NEW YORK — At the end of “The Searchers,” one of John Wayne’s most renowned Westerns, a kidnapped girl has been rescued and a family reunited. As the closing music swells, Wayne’s character looks around at his kin — people who have other people to lean on — and then walks off toward the dusty West Texas horizon, alone.
It’s a classic example of a fundamental American tale — a male-dominated story filled with loners and “rugged individualists” who suck it up, do what needs to be done, ride off into the sunset and like it that way.
In reality, loneliness in America can be deadly. This month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it an American epidemic, saying that it takes as deadly a toll as smoking upon the population of the United States. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows,” he said, “and that’s not right.”
He cited some potent forces: the gradual withering of longstanding institutions, decreased engagement with churches, the fraying bonds of extended families. When you add recent stressors — the rise of social media and virtual life, post-9/11 polarization and the way COVID-19 interrupted existence — the challenge becomes even more stark.
People are lonely the world over. But as far back as the early 19th century, when the word “loneliness” began to be used in its current context in American life, some were already asking: Do the contours of American society — that emphasis on individualism, that spreading out with impunity over a vast, sometimes outsized landscape — encourage isolation and alienation?
Or is that, like other chunks of the American story, a premise built on myths?
Alexis de Tocqueville, watching the country as an outsider while writing “Democracy in America” in the mid-1800s, wondered whether, “as social conditions become more equal,” Americans and people like them would be inclined to reject the trappings of deep community that had pervaded Old World aristocracies for centuries.
“They acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands,” he wrote. “Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it … throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
This has been a recurring thread in how Americans perceive themselves. In the age before democracy, for better and for worse, “People weren’t lonely. They were tied up in a web of connections. And in many countries, that’s more true than it was in the United States,” says Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.
“There’s this idea that going out into those vast spaces and connecting with the wilderness and escaping the past was precisely what made us Americans,” Woodard says.
Yet many frontier myths skip over how important community has been in the settling and growth of the nation. Some of the biggest stories of cooperation — the rise of municipal organizations and trade unions, the New Deal programs that helped drag many Americans out of the Depression in the 1930s, war efforts from the Civil War to World War II — sometimes get lost in the fervor for character-driven stories of individualism.
