In 1837, a group of settlers left Milwaukee for the area now Whitewater, and arrived after little under a week’s travel. They were the first settlers to arrive at a place where only tribes had lived before.
If you’re reading from the east coast, 1837 may not seem nearly as early or as hazardous as original settlements in your home state. It was hard, though, to travel the distance from Milwaukee, over uncertain terrain.
Those early settlers came to Whitewater with ambition, commitment, and dedication to a hard task. Yet they came without something that so many earlier colonial settlements had – they came without the backing of king and financiers, without a great court behind them. They came as a group, risking as individuals and families.
There is, in that settlement, and so many others like it throughout the Midwest, a fundamental belief about small-town America. In stories and film, small towns like Whitewater are often exemplars of individual effort, endurance, and achievement. The individual liberty and enterprise that America’s founders saw as part of the American promise is supposed to be a cardinal virtue of small town life.
Perhaps America’s lost her way, grown jaded and soft, but surely that’s not true for a place like Whitewater, Wisconsin. The admirable and the good of American individualism and private energy should be alive here, in my town, if anywhere.
One of the themes of this website is that small-town Whitewater has lost its way, drifted from the ambition and energy and private ingenuity of America, into the habit of declaring success rather than achieving it. The more we insist – sometimes comically – on our own exceptionism, the farther we slip from what is truly exceptional and astonishing about America.
I’ll not speculate about whether the kind of individualism and commitment Whitewater’s settlers exhibited flourishes elsewhere in America. I am quite sure that it does. Sadly, we’ve abandoned it here, in favor of a culture that resists private initiative, and insists on the role of a small but intrusive local government in residents’ lives.
Whitewater’s an example of what goes wrong, what still goes right, and what could be far better, if we set aside an empty and self-serving local exceptionalism for the true and American exceptionalism of individual liberty, private initiative, and openness to new people and ideas.