Summary Of David Potter's People Of Plenty

American post-war culture of the 1950s emphasized prosperity and its accessibility. Because “a majority of American families enthusiastically participated in a culture of abundance and leisure,” many Americans viewed that abundance as universal. As a result of this prosperity and of the political centrism of the 1950s and early 1960s, a new movement arose in the field of history called consensus history, which focused on “majority beliefs and attitudes dominant in the public sphere” and highlighted unity and those unified beliefs as a force in American history. David Potter, a consensus historian and history professor who taught at Yale and Stanford from 1942 to 1971, wrote People of Plenty in 1954 as a contribution to consensus history

David Potter himself categorized his contemporary historians as “lumpers” or “splitters” and, drawing a connection to zoology, explained that “lumpers” found the similarities within a genus while “splitters” looked for difference. John Higham wrote that the consensus historian’s view of America was “as a picture of social diversity, not of solid uniformity…They proposed, therefore, that Americans were a variegated people held together by a unifying ideology or a common way of life.” Leo Ribuffo adds that consensus history assumed "there were agreements on basic values and procedures, rival groups of comparable power balanced each other, questions of ultimate truth and personal identity were relegated to the private sphere, and society settled for slow but steady progress instead of demanding sudden transformation" because a superficial look at the United States would present such a society. With this understanding of his country, David Potter sought to define exactly what the national character was that bound Americans together, in fact criticizing past historians for continuing “to utilize the concept [of national character] for operational purposes even when they fail to defend it as an idea” and for adopting the concept at a practical level while remaining skeptical of its theoretical existence. In

Turner credits the frontier with American nationalism, individualism, and democracy, but while Potter agrees with these attributes, he questions whether the disappearance of a frontier would make these traits less American. As Potter writes, “Turner did not recognize that the attraction of the frontier was simply as the most accessible form of abundance,” one that had since been replaced with other frontiers, like industrialization, and other means of defining prosperity,