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Brewer (1902) compares the statement “I am an American citizen” to the period of the
Roman Empire and the exalted cry of “I am a Roman citizen.” Where the pride and declaration
are similar, Brewer (1902) references the claim of being an American citizen as “the diploma of
the world, the highest which humanity has to bestow” (p. 84). It is this United States of America
that Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831-1832 and discovered the great “advantage of equality”
that created a nation of joiners, organizers, and leaders.
Civic Life in America
During his brief visit to the United States in the early 19
th
Century, Alexis de
Tocqueville’s impressions of American society present not only how smitten he was with the
nation and the relationships in this growing country, but also the prominence of formal
associations in its towns and communities . Although the extreme conditions of equality
Tocqueville found in every aspect of American life was his most striking and profound
discovery, he continuously noted the myriad of associations and the associational life that were
formed because of this all-embracing equality .
The political associations which exist in the United States are only a single feature in the
midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages,
all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have no only
commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a
thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous
or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found
establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to
send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and
schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the
Convention