If You Have Insurance You Like

I've been thinking about President Obama and the line, if you have a health plan you like, you can keep it.

I don't think he knew he was wrong.  That's because I worked for an insurance company for sixteen years, and I didn't know he was wrong.

There are a couple of pieces to this.  First, back in 2009, I took this as a statement addressed primarily to people who had health insurance through their employers.  The idea was that the old employer-based health insurance system wasn't going away.  The same for people on Medicare.  And this statement is true for these groups.

Second, the individual insurance market was and is notorious.  It didn't occur to me that people covered here would prefer their existing policies to better policies that were cheaper.

Third, the junk policies, which are relatively recent and can be found in both the individual and the employer-provided market.  Among the worst of these policies are those that provide no coverage for hospitalization.

Without putting too fine a point on it, hospital stays are the expensive part of the health system.  (I know, I know.  Drugs are expensive.  Stay with me.)  Traditionally, hospital stays were what insurance was for.

It never occurred to me that anyone would like one of these junk policies.  They're better than nothing, but to my mind they're not real insurance.  They don't keep you from being bankrupted, and they don't keep you from being kicked out to die when you run out of money.

So I made two mistakes.  First, I was distracted by the fact that most people weren't affected by the new law.  Second, I thought the people who were affected understood the coverage they had.

On this second part, I should have known better.  And so should the President.  But I'm not going to lose sleep over this one, and I hope he doesn't either.

P.S.  I wonder if the insurance companies told the administration they were sending out cancellation notices before they did it.

I Crashed the Server: Thoughts on the Healthcare.gov Debacle

Benefits are complicated.  Really complicated.  I remember at Cigna there was a competition between the payroll people and the benefits people.  Payroll was always on top of its game.  Benefits was constantly floundering.

Payroll is complicated in a large corporation. Taxes in how many states -- we'll leave out international.  And local taxes.  And the deductions that the benefits people feed over.

Payroll was cocky.  Eventually they got their reward.  They got to take over the benefits operations.  And one day I was walking out of a meeting, and a senior payroll guy said to me, "You know, benefits are really complicated."

I think a lot of this complication is unnecessary -- just what you get when you leave insurance companies to their own devices for a century or so.  But it's not going away.

Split Eligibility
Here's an example.  You have a retired couple.  The former employee has just turned 65.  The spouse is 62.  They've both been on the retiree health plan, but now the retired employee is signing up for Medicare.  The spouse is not eligible for Medicare.  What do you do?

The answer is called split eligibility.  The former employee gets Medicare as primary insurance, and the company provides a wrap policy to pick up expenses that Medicare doesn't cover.  Meanwhile, the spouse stays on the old company retiree health policy.

But wait.  It's one policy.  Computer programs are written to provide one set of benefits for one policy.  What do you do?  You write a whole new, much more complicated computer program.

Did I tell you your head was going to hurt?  Mine did, for years.

Benefits are complicated.  And, let's face it, benefits are boring.  So are benefits websites. Who, other than computer geeks, could possibly want to play around in the guts of a benefits website?  Certainly not me.  And yet I went to the meetings for 16 years, my eyes glazing over, my mind wandering to the day I would walk the Elysian Fields.

For this simple reason -- the crashing boredom involved -- management tends to leave benefits websites to the IT people.  Bad mistake.

Remembering Y2K
IT people love it when they're left alone.  Remember Y2K?  Most of the world's computers were supposed to crash when 1999 became 2000, because they could not recognize a year that began in 20 instead of 19.  Big problem.  Created of course by the IT people.  And they solved it.  They said, give us a lot of money and go away for a couple of years, and we'll fix this.  Just don't ask us to do anything else while we're off playing with ourselves, fixing a problem that we created.

And that's pretty much what happened, at least at Cigna.

I Crashed the Server
IT people just aren't good at playing nice with others.  This brings me to the day that I crashed the server.  We'd been working on a new web-based program for some benefit -- I honestly don't remember what -- and we needed to do a launch.  This involved sending an email to our 40,000 employees, asking them to click on a button and go to the website.  Maybe just have a look, maybe do something.  But definitely click the button and go to the website.

Our group -- the communications geeks -- suggested that we stagger the emails to employees over the course of the launch day -- a few thousand here, a few thousand there -- so that we wouldn't overwhelm the system by sending 40,000 people an email at once, having 40,000 people open the email at once, and having 40,000 people click the button at once.  We were a bit worried about whether the website would be able to handle that.

No problem, said our IT confreres.  I believe the word "robust" was used.  As in "robust website configuration," or something.  So we sent out about 40,000 emails at once, and about 40,000 people clicked the button more or less at once, and the server crashed.

Or, more accurately, I crashed the server.  Someone needs to be blamed for such a terrible thing.  After all, the IT people had some cleanup to do, the site wasn't available for awhile, and management was terribly embarrassed that such a thing happened on their watch, while they weren't watching.

The Joy of Lunch
Shortly thereafter, I was at a nice communications meeting at a hotel near the office.  This involved lunch in a large room at tables with tablecloths, and of course an open and forthright dialog among people whose incomes varied by a factor of 100.

At one point the divisional IT vice president stood up at his table down front and said he was very unhappy that I had crashed the server.  I waited a beat, then stood up at my table (which was more toward the back, away from the dais), and said that I proposed to keep crashing the server until we got the systems support that we needed.  For what it's worth, he left the company before I did.

Don't Trust the Consultants
So don't leave these things to the IT people.  Number one.  Number two, don't trust the consultants.  Another story.

We were launching yet another major program -- I don't remember this one either, they all blend together -- and we were at a large meeting in a very nice conference room on a floor to which I had never been admitted before.

We were there with the program's chief consultant, to make sure our communications plans were in order.  I was reliably informed that this fellow drove a Rolls-Royce.  I hadn't expected to speak at the meeting, but Mr. Rolls-Royce, as he went down his checklist, asked a question:  What percentage of employees did we expect to reach with our elaborate program of communications?

Nobody spoke for a while.  Then a helpful vice president suggested that I should answer the question.

"Oh, 80 to 90 percent," I said.  I was mindful of riding in an elevator some time previously.  We'd been encouraging employees to move their 401(k) money out of a fund that we were discontinuing.  The fund had $200 million in it, and for a variety of reasons it was better if individuals moved their money out voluntarily, rather than have us do it for them.

Two men were talking in front of me in the elevator.  One asked the other what he was going to do with his money.  The second man asked the first man what he was talking about.  The first man said, Didn't you get the letter about the fund closing?  (The letter I wrote.)  The second man said, "Oh, I never read my Cigna mail."

As we used to say, again and again, attention to benefits information is very low.  (The low attention levels and the complexity of medical benefits explain why people keep saying on surveys that they don't understand Obamacare.  They never will.)

But back to the meeting with Mr. Rolls-Royce.  He pondered my 80-90 percent answer for a moment, then said he was sure that management would require our communications to reach 100 percent of employees.  And he wrote something on his paper.  I think it was probably 100 percent.

Consultants tell management what they think it wants to hear.  What they say may or may not have a connection with reality.
 
Some Classic Mistakes
So here's what I think happened with Healthcare.gov.  Lulled by consultants who had no clue of the difficulties involved in benefits websites, management deferred to the IT professionals, who also had no clue of the difficulties involved in benefits websites.

Some other classic mistakes occurred.  Benefits sites always have a hub -- medical, dental, life insurance, 401(k) all need to talk with eligibility and payroll.  Healthcare.gov, drawing from a host of government databases and dealing with a host of insurance companies in dozens of states, had that problem on steroids.  This is simply not an easy design problem, and I suspect that it's the basic one.

Bottlenecks.  Okay, who said, Hey, let's get everybody to open an account before they can browse.  Amazon lets you look at the books before you buy them.  Somebody help me out here.  Consumer behavior:  First you browse, then you buy.

Something that I haven't heard about -- and I don't know if it's an issue, but I suspect that it is -- is the ping-pong phenomenon.  At one point at Cigna, we decided to go with an outside vendor for our employees' annual enrollment.  The vendor was in Massachusetts; we were in Philadelphia.  A slender electronic pipe connected us.  Programs that had worked just fine when all the servers were in the same room all of a sudden didn't work so well.

Apparently the programs were used to chit-chatting in a very intense back-and-forth manner.  This round-tripping, as I think it was called, all of a sudden took actual time, and the delays just got worse as the communications pipe got more and more clogged.  Eventually the problem was fixed.  I don't remember how.

Last Story
One last story.  Eventually management decided it was time to do a complete overhaul of its pay and benefits systems.  A lot of the underlying programs we were using were quite antiquated, our hub had been jerry-built over the years with inadequate funding and unrealistic expectations, and frankly I thought a top-to-bottom overhaul was a good idea.  Until I heard about the consultants.

Yet another large meeting.  I managed not to say anything, and transferred to the international division shortly thereafter.  Much later I heard from an IT friend about launch day.  Unbeknownst to the consultants, my friend had stored a backup of the old system on a little-used server (Cigna had a lot of them at that point).   D-Day came.  The consultants triumphantly flipped their switch, turning off the old system and turning on the new one.  According to my friend (this is his story, but I believe him), the new system promptly crashed, and the consultants panicked.  They had no backup plan.  The system they had turned off had been trashed in the process of turning it off.  My friend let them sweat for a few minutes and then he flipped on the backup system that he had stored away.  Nobody on the outside ever noticed that the site had gone down, and a few weeks later the consultants had debugged their system, and the relaunch went seamlessly.

Unfortunately, my friend's option wasn't available to Healthcare.gov.  It wasn't replacing anything.  It was brand-new.  But the problems Healthcare.gov has been facing are not new, and they're not subtle.

How Do I Feel?
How do I feel about that?  I worked awfully hard to help get the Affordable Care Act passed, and I'm angry that the administration made such obvious mistakes with the implementation.  I feel President Obama let me down on this one.  I'm sorry, but it's personal.

Obama Plays Chess

President Obama has given Syria to Congress, and it appears most of the media has missed the story.  Possibly on purpose.  Lots of long faces -- Obama on the ropes etc.  I do have the feeling I'm being played.  Set up a cliff-hanger, then watch Houdini-Obama escape again.  Makes for good television.  Sells newspapers.  The White House is just fine with it.  John Boehner, poor sod, probably isn't so happy.

Boehner must know that Obama has just forked him -- it's a chess move.  If Congress approves bombing Syria, Obama gets to bomb Syria, and the responsibility for it -- and everything that follows -- lies not with Obama but with Congress. 

And if Congress won't let him bomb Syria, then everything that happens in Syria becomes the property of Congress.

Obama just dropped a little horsie-knight on a square that nobody -- not even his own staff -- expected him to occupy.  So Boehner can lose a bishop, or a badly positioned queen.  And Obama doesn't care which.

Congress owns Syria.  They're stuck.  I think I need some popcorn.

Syria and Queen Anne's War

I've been thinking about Syria. And the decrease in government's power to fight wars. I came of age during the Vietnam War, and I carried a draft card. When the draft was abolished, it was very meaningful for me.

Recently, I believe it was Prime Minister Cameron who told the House of Commons in London that President George W. Bush had poisoned the well of government credibility with his lies about the Iraq War.

Vietnam said no more mass infantry wars.  Iraq said -- what?  Maybe, we'll never believe you again.  I'm not sure.

There's a longer historical progression here. If you go back to the eighteenth century, the business of monarchs was war. Anybody remember what Queen Anne's War was about? I don't, but I'm sure it involved royal vanity, along with Kissingerian statecraft.  (Actually, I just looked it up.  It was about who should be king of Spain.)

The idea that governments should do things other than war -- say look after the welfare of the people -- really got its start with the American Revolution.

As I often do, I find myself feeling sorry for President Obama. He wants to do the right thing.  And here he is paying for George W.'s sins.

But maybe, long-term, we're on a good arc. Maybe government has other tasks, beyond figuring out who has the biggest missile.

What if Romeo and Juliet Had a Baby?

David Brooks' article on mutts in the Times (June 27) really bothers me.  I have a few questions.

If an Episcopalian marries a Presbyterian, are the products of their union to be called mutts?  (My parents.  Me.  And my brother.)

If a Welshman marries an Englishwoman, shall we call their issue mutts?

If a Hungarian marries a Dane, do we call their kids mutts?  (My mother's parents.)

If an Irishman marries an Italian, do we get mutts?

If an Ashkenazi Jew marries a Sephardic Jew -- mutts?

If an Episcopalian marries a Jew, are their children mutts?  (Me.  And my wife.  And our children.)

If a Christian marries a Muslim?

If a white woman from Kansas marries a black man from Kenya?

I could go on.  In fact, I will.

William the Conqueror's father was from a Scandinavian family.  He was duke of Normandy in France.  William's mother was a townie from Falaise in Normandy.  William became king of England -- hence the Conqueror name.  What do you say?  A mutt?

Julius Caesar and Cleopatra had a baby.  Julius was Italian.  Cleopatra was Egyptian.  Was Caesarion a mutt?  Would you be willing to say that to his parents?

The concept of a mutt, or mongrel, derives from the idea of racial purity, which is pursued these days mainly by the likes of the American Kennel Club.  Race as a scientific concept has been exploded -- although many still quietly adhere to the old learning.  I think the attraction is the corollary concept of a master race.

I was attending a service in St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue years ago.  Wedding, baptism, funeral, something else?  I actually forget.  The minister touched briefly on sin, so it may have been a baptism.

He suggested that many of us probably didn't feel particularly sinful (we were Episcopalians after all).  But he said we also probably thought we were better than most other people.  And that, he gently reminded us, is a sin.

We Were There All Along

The chattering classes seem to have reached yet another consensus.  This one has to do with what happened to the Obama army after the 2008 election.  Briefly the narrative arc is that we felt our job was done, and we pulled up stakes and went home.

That's not quite the way it was.  We were sent home.  We were undeniably weary, but we were ready to continue.

My wife and I labored for Obama in 2008, as well as this year.  After the inauguration in 2009, we even held a healthcare house party,  filling out forms and mailing them in, as requested.  We received a polite thank-you, and then basically nothing.

The President at that time was in his post-partisan phase, cuddling up to the conservatives.  His focus seemed to shift inside the Beltway.  We saw the need for a permanent campaign that dealt with issues as well as elections, but the idea didn't seem to have any resonance inside the White House.

I asked my friend Wendell Potter,  the healthcare reformer and author of Deadly Spin, what I should do, and he suggested I contact Health Care for America Now.  I did, and in February 2010 wound up walking, as part of a group of eight, from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in support of healthcare reform -- 135 miles, as I recall.

In Washington, we had a rally attended by a number of senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid.  The White House was conspicuously absent.

I'm very glad the President now seems to have accepted the concept of a permanent campaign.  We were there all along, and so were the Republicans.

I think this was the greatest mistake of President Obama's first term.

Pennsylvania 2014. How do we avoid the debacle of 2010?

1.  We need an inspirational leader.  Obama won't be on the ballot.  We have a problem.  I don't have a solution.

2.  We need support from D. C.  When Joe Sestak beat Joe Biden's friend, Arlen Specter, in the primary, D.C. seemed to lose interest in us. 

3.  We need unity in Pennsylvania.  My impression was that there was a lot of factional bickering in 2010.

4.  We need to rebuild or replace the Philadelphia Democratic Party.  The local party seems content to win local races with low turnout and no competition.  That actually seems to be their business model.  OFA -- Obama's army -- produced the turnout in 2008 and 2012.

Houston, we have a problem.  Or four.

Rugged Individualism: From Daniel Boone to Barack Obama

This story takes place on South Street in Philadelphia. It was late afternoon on a warm, pleasant day, and I was just finishing the drive home from my job in Delaware. On South Street I would start to relax. The Interstates - I-95 and Schuylkill - were behind me. And so was the last bear trap - a large steel plate on the old South Street bridge that either covered or partially covered a huge hole in the pavement, depending on the day.

Some days the sense of relief was almost euphoric, but on this day, as on many days, my mood was more contemplative, even elegiac.

Near the bridge there are two lanes of traffic on South Street, with parking in a third lane to the left. I was following a pickup truck in the right-hand lane.

Just ahead of the pickup, in the left-hand traffic lane, was a car. Ahead of the car, in the parking lane, was a simply enormous box truck. It took up all the parking space and a good chunk of the lane the car was trying to drive in.

For those of you who don't drive in Philly, this is a very common situation. If it's not an oversize truck, it's a badly placed pothole. The solution is to cheat into the other traffic lane. People do it all the time. Big vehicles do it more than small ones, but basically everybody does it.

If you don't do it, life can get expensive. Once I was driving on the Schuylkill in traffic and, because of the car in front of me, I didn't see a hole until it was too late. Some construction people had cut a hole about 3' x 3', maybe 2' deep. The man in my dealer's service department actually chuckled when he gave me the news. My tire was fine but my rim was so badly dented that it had to be replaced. (It turns out that a rim is the round metal part that I would ordinarily call a wheel.)

But that's another story. Back to South Street. The guy in the car, who is staring at the big box truck that's about to remove the left side of his car (I did see a bus get the entire left side peeled off once, but that's also another story), anyway the driver starts to cheat to the right.

But then he sees he can't, so he slams on the brakes. Fortunately there's nobody following him.

I'm pretty sure the driver of the pickup truck in front of me actually tapped his accelerator, instead of his brake, just to make sure the other guy couldn't borrow a couple of feet of his lane.

Anyway the fellow in the car fell behind us, and I think he must have turned off, because I don't remember seeing him again. At the next light, to my surprise, I found myself next to the guy in the pickup. As I said, it was a warm day, and I noticed that he had his driver's-side window down. I lowered my passenger-side window and said hello, in a friendly way.

The fellow seemed surprised that someone was talking to him, but he said hello back. I asked him if he'd seen the other driver getting jammed by the parked truck. He said he had. I asked him why he hadn't slowed down to let the car go by.

And that's when it happened. He told me what he actually thought. I don't know if it was the oddity of someone actually speaking to him, car to car, in the middle of South Street, in the big city, but he proceeded to give me, in stream of consciousness, well larded with profanity, what I later took to be his philosophy of life.

He owned the lane he was driving in, he said, and as long as he was in it he could do anything he wanted. And nobody else should try to get in his way.

When you're channeling someone else's psyche, possibly his id, I'm not sure it's possible to hold up your side of the conversation. I'm sure I said something, possibly about the brake pedal being a useful tool. And we parted amicably enough.

Walking home from the garage, I was still in a state of shock at my discovery. I had thought that all the discourtesy and mayhem on the highway was a result of negligence and testosterone. But I had been wrong. There was a higher principle involved. Our streets and highways are the last refuge of America's tradition of rugged individualism.

President Obama actually used the words rugged individualism in his speech to the joint session of Congress last September. "Yes, we are rugged individualists," he said.

It's interesting how often these two words get used to describe a core part of our identity as Americans. But what do they really mean? Is it simply, "Your liberty ends where my fist begins," as a college chum was wont to say?

Daniel Boone

I like to think of Daniel Boone as the Godfather of Rugged Individualism. With his cry of "Elbow room!" (it appears he did actually say something like this) Boone epitomized the view that the best neighbors were no neighbors. Apparently if he could see his neighbor's chimney smoke from his front yard, it was time to move.

Boone was born in 1734 near Reading, Pennsylvania (there's a high school named after him). His peripatetic life made him a leader in America's westward push through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and Tennessee, and out onto the Great Plains. His travels may have taken him as far as the lands that are now Yellowstone National Park. He died in 1820 in Missouri. And, yes, just like his younger contemporary Davy Crockett, he does seem to have been fond of coonskin caps.

So what was Daniel Boone after, really? Was it simply that, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "Hell is other people"? That has to be a piece of it. But there has to be more. I think the pioneers looked into the woods and saw a new way of life.

The ideal is fairly clear: lots of hunting and fishing, some subsistence farming, and a good bit of spinning and weaving and sewing for clothes. Basically, if you do everything yourself, nobody else can put you under his thumb. Economists call this autarky.

We also need to talk about the conditions that the pioneers were leaving. The Emma Lazarus poem at the Statue of Liberty isn't a joke. People left the old country to get away from societies designed to provide a good living for the top 1 percent. Most of us know about this, but I'm wondering how many have heard of indentured servitude. This was a system where people paid for their boat ticket to America by agreeing to work as a servant for a master in the New World, for a number of years.

This situation was a lot better than slavery, if only because it had a time limit. Still, we need only look at the way Saudi Arabians today are accused of mistreating their Indonesian and Filipino servants to see the potential for abuse.

So it's not surprising that a lot of newly sprung servants were eager to move west, away from a society predicated on servitude.

The only problem with cutting yourself off from the old society was that it didn't work. Rugged individualism was an unworkable idea from the beginning. As he left for the west in his coonskin cap, the typical pioneer was carrying a Kentucky rifle in the crook of his arm. This rifle was cutting-edge technology in the eighteenth century, and no well-dressed frontiersman wanted to be seen without one. Think of it as the iPhone of its day. And don't be distracted by the coonskin caps.

So the pioneers took the modern world with them to the west. And very soon they found themselves headed back east, loaded with the fruits of the frontier, so they could trade them for more of the products of modern civilization.

The Whiskey Rebellion

One of these fruits of the frontier was whiskey. Farmers out west were growing corn and rye, but these were bulky crops, and the roads going back east were bad. So they took to distilling whiskey. It takes a lot of corn, or rye, or whatever to make a barrel of whiskey. So it was much easier to transport, and it fetched a fair price.

These forerunners of Jack Daniel and Jim Beam had a good thing going, so good that the new federal government decided to tax it. And hence we come to the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.

Militarily, the Whiskey Rebellion was a kerfuffle. Some farmers in western Pennsylvania intimidated a few tax collectors, and a few people were killed. President Washington sent in some troops, and peace quickly broke out. Psychologically, it's more interesting.

What were those farmers thinking? I'm thinking it's not so much that the whiskey tax threatened their business model. The real threat, I think, was to their identity as rugged individualists. If they couldn't be entirely separate, at least they could set the terms of their interaction with the outside world. Well, maybe not.

The Amish struggle with this issue today. Just about every week I walk over to the Reading Terminal Market and buy Lebanon bologna and other deli items from a nice Amish lady. She is in my world but not of it. The teenage Amish are not of my world either, but they wear really cool sneakers. I've heard some of the girls actually have cell phones, but I haven't seen that.

It's a tricky balance, and it shifts. I think the Amish will be okay, because they work together as a group. I suppose you could call them rugged conformists.

Come to think of it, I suppose you could call the Puritans in seventeenth century Massachusetts rugged conformists.

Anyway, the fact is that rugged individualism, despite its unworkability, has proved a remarkably popular and durable idea.

James Fenimore Cooper

Part of the reason for this has to be a writer named James Fenimore Cooper. In his five Leatherstocking Tales, published between 1823 and 1841, he gave the world the literary archetype of the rugged frontiersman - Daniel Boone's fictional avatar.

Cooper's father, William, had founded a pioneering village at the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, in New York state in 1786. He called it Cooperstown, and, yes, that's where the Baseball Hall of Fame is. Only it didn't come until later - baseball had to be invented first.

Cooper grew up here, and it was very woodsy at the time. And it is in a fictionalized version of Cooperstown that we first meet Natty Bumppo, aka Deerslayer, aka Hawkeye. Through his hero, Cooper gave us the frontier, that liminal area between the primeval wilderness and modern civilization. And he gave us the frontiersman - noble, resourceful, always somewhat out of place when he came to town. Cooper wrote it down, and America read it and wanted to be it.

There's a direct line between Hawkeye and Gary Cooper in High Noon. But then there are a lot of direct lines. Here's one of my favorites.

Towards the end of his life, in The Prairie, Hawkeye finds himself out of the woods and on the Great Plains, again mimicking Daniel Boone, who died a mere seven years before The Prairie was published. Unlike Boone, Hawkeye never married and had a family. So he had a problem. There was no Social Security or Medicare at the time, and society looked to each family to care for its own. And Hawkeye didn't have a family.

So he got himself adopted by the local Indian tribe. He did have other offers, but they would have involved him leaving the world where he was comfortable, and going back to town, where he had always felt out of place. I must say, the last few pages of this book (which has its tiresome moments earlier on) are pretty amazing. Natty Bumppo dies, saying of himself and his forebears, "We have never been chiefs; but honest and useful in our way, I hope it cannot be denied, we have always proved ourselves."

I don't think Cooper was aiming at the death of a Viking king, but that's what it felt like to me.

Fast forward to 1948, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Based on a novel by B. Traven, starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston, the movie follows a group of gold prospectors in Mexico in 1925, and manages a critique of capitalism along the way. Things go reasonably well when the miners trust one another and cooperate, and less well when they don't. Gold is found, gold is lost, people are killed, and at the end the Old Guy (played by Walter Huston, the director's father) decides he's had enough of the modern world and retires to the local Indian village. After two hours of capitalism red in fang and claw, we finally see a safety net in action.

Pardon the digression, but I do think Cooper's influence is underrated, both in the arts and in our culture generally. I don't think rugged individualism would be where it is today without him.

What We're Really Good At

Even in Cooper's time, there were those who saw that what Americans were really good at was cooperation. "To act collectively is according to the spirit of our institutions," wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden (1854). This from a guy who was living by himself in the woods.

Even earlier, in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at how "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations." He added, "I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object for the exertions of a great many men and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it."

Why are we so good at cooperation? "Each American knows when to sacrifice some of his private interests to save the rest," writes de Tocqueville, calling it the "principle of self-interest rightly understood."

Professor Francis Fukuyama, who's a lot younger than de Tocqueville, says that we're just good at trusting one another. In his 1995 book Trust (which manages to be an even slower read than de Tocqueville), he has a chapter on us entitled "Rugged Conformists" (and yes, that's where I got the term). It turns out that we are better at this trust thing than just about anyone else - or at least we were back in the Clinton administration. In many societies, trust does not extend much beyond the family - as the Arabs used to say, "My brother against my cousin, and my cousin against the world."

Here things are different. Thoreau saw it; de Tocqueville saw it. Here's Fukuyama: "From the moment of its founding up through its rise at the time of World War I as the world's premier industrial power, the United States was anything but an individualistic society. It was, in fact, a society with a high propensity for spontaneous sociability, which enjoyed a widespread degree of generalized social trust and could therefore create large economic organizations in which nonkin could cooperate easily for common economic ends."

I can't resist. Here's some more: "It remains true that Americans tend to be antistatist, despite the substantial growth of big government in the United States in the twentieth century. But those same antistatist Americans voluntarily submit to the authority of a variety of intermediate social groups, including families, churches, local communities, workplaces, unions, and professional organizations. Conservatives, who are opposed to the state's delivering certain kinds of welfare services, usually describe themselves as believers in individualism. But such people are often simultaneously in favor of the strengthening of the authority of certain social institutions like the family or the church. In this respect they are not being individualistic at all; rather, they are proponents of a nonstatist form of communitarianism." (You have no idea what I had to plow through to get that.)

Where does this willingness to trust, this propensity for voluntary association, come from? Fukuyama wants to attribute it to religion. I'm inclined to think that's part of it, but I think we also need to look to the development of commercial law in this country, and the rise of the American business corporation, which allowed people to limit the risk that comes with cooperation. I'm guessing it's a bunch of things, but I would like to avoid "American exceptionalism" or "the genius of the American people" - although I will readily agree that these sound bites encourage more confidence than "we have no idea."

A Durable Fantasy

So it turns out that we're not rugged individualists after all. Still, it's been a remarkably durable fantasy.

Why is that? Beyond its roots in our early history, and the brilliant public relations work of James Fenimore Cooper, why has this idea found such traction?

Because it's useful. Who among us really wants to be a good bureaucrat? It may be what we do all day, but somewhere there has to be a place for personality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson saw this early on: "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its adversion."

This is from Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance, which appeared in 1841, the same year James Fenimore Cooper published the last of his Leatherstocking Tales, The Deerslayer. Wouldn't you much rather be the Deerslayer?

Different Strands

When I first started thinking about this article I knew I needed to talk about Emerson - we studied him in school, and he was one of my heroes. I assumed he would fit neatly into the story. I was wrong.

Rugged individualism is mainly about economics, and it is intimately connected to the frontier. (In this, at least, I think that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner and his famous Turner thesis of 1893 show an insight of enduring value.)

Emerson was a minister, and he was more interested in philosophy than economics. He was trying to figure out how you can function in society without losing your soul: "...you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

This is also from the essay on Self-Reliance, and it is a different train of thought from rugged individualism.

Manhood at Harvard

Here's another line of development that I initially confused with rugged individualism. In 1996 Professor Kim Townsend came out with a book called Manhood at Harvard. In it he explores the development of an ideal of manliness that was new in American higher education.

In the years after the Civil War, people looked back to the energy and the discipline the war brought forth in so many of the soldiers, and wondered if there wasn't some way to foster that in civil life.

William James plays a central role in Townsend's book. Near the end of his life, James set forth the issue succinctly in an essay called The Moral Equivalent of War (1906). He ends by calling for a form of civilian national service, an idea that still hasn't gained much traction. But in the late nineteenth century, America was industrializing, and it's hard not to see the attraction of this approach to the emerging corporate giants of the day. After all, Ralph Waldo Emerson would not have done well at a large American company. He spent too much time thinking, and, worse, he thought for himself.

So, military vigor it was, transferred to the civilian arena. As Townsend notes, Harvard "could not provide a war, but it could provide the next best thing - combat on playing rather than battle fields."

Enter football. Also rowing, wrestling, you name it. But mainly football. America's colleges haven't been the same since.

Nobody epitomizes this new manliness better than Theodore Roosevelt, who also plays a major role in Townsend's book. Because he's so quirky, we may be tempted to call him not only manly, but a rugged individualist. However, his career, from New York City police commissioner to the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill to the White House, shows that he was something different. He acted in and through organizations, often very large organizations. Teddy Roosevelt, and all the football players, and the soldiers of the Civil War, are rugged conformists.

The Closing of the Frontier

The superintendent of the 1890 Census declared the American frontier closed. We miss it. So much, in fact, that John Kennedy, one of whose favorite words was "vigor," found us all a New Frontier as we raced the Russians to the moon. Not a lot of rugged individualists at NASA, but several of the astronauts turned out to have personalities.

And rugged individualism continues to be a part of our mental makeup. It helps that it now has a name. This is an oddity, but for a very long time the term rugged individualism seems not to have existed. Frederick Jackson Turner should have coined it in his 1893 essay on the frontier, but he didn't. He called it "that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil." Too subtle by half.

Turner did provide a nice psychological profile of the individualist: "That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy" - he goes on, but you get the idea.

Back to the christening of rugged individualism. This apparently did not occur until October 1928, when Herbert Hoover, running for president, referred to "the American system of rugged individualism" in a speech in New York City. (He also said, "We are nearer today to the ideal of the abolition of poverty and fear from the lives of men and women than ever before in any land." We elected him and promptly took a detour called the Great Depression, but still it's nice to see a Republican talking about eliminating fear and want as if it were a good thing.)

The appeal of rugged individualism has continued to have practical effects in our daily lives. The move to the suburbs, back in the 1950's, looks suspiciously like the migration through the Cumberland Gap, with the road west being played in the remake by the Long Island Expressway. "Elbow room!" cried Daniel Boone. Or at least Levittown. And even today, what about those SUVs? If you own a vehicle that can go off-road at any time, how can you not be a rugged individualist, even if you never, ever go off-road?

And of course, we see it in our politics. In his speech to Congress last September, the one where he referred to rugged individualism, President Obama tweaked his opposition by describing their "notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle the government, refund everybody's money, and let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they're on their own."

It's a good thing that, when push comes to shove, we're really not rugged individualists. I'm thinking that it's almost time for us to accept who we are. If you don't like the moniker rugged conformist, here's a line from Thoreau for you: "Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men." I've been thinking about that sentence since I first read it as a teenager. It's incredibly archaic. We don't have noblemen, and we do have women. And we don't live in villages. But if you can get past all that, I think there's a nice insight there.