Our America: Why You Can Count On Us

From our earliest days, we've been known as a nation of helpers.

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The ramshackle Oldsmobile that carried me between my parents' home in Virginia and the University of Colorado had 150,000 miles on it, burned a quart of oil with every tank of gas, and would pop out of second gear into neutral unless you were accelerating. That didn't stop my younger brother and his best friend from asking for a lift on my way back to school in Boulder to spend the summer. It was 1973, and gas was cheap, so I brought them along—even making a thousand-mile detour so they could see California.

That car made it as far as Utah. Twenty miles outside Salt Lake City, with the Olds low on oil and water and the motor running hot, flames started licking out from under the hood. We sputtered to the side of the road, pulled our belongings out of the trunk, and watched the fire burn itself out. Three teenagers with long hair, little money, and no clue, we stood helplessly together in the chilly western night on the side of Interstate 80.

Our savior spotted us from across the freeway and flashed his lights so we'd know he'd seen us. He was heading in the opposite direction and had to drive a few miles to an exit to turn around. Soon he was pulling his pickup truck alongside us, with his wife in the cab. He jumped out and lifted up the Olds's hood, made some ominous sounds, and towed us to a gas station. The garage attendant told us what we already feared: We'd thrown a rod, and the engine was frozen. Our car was kaput. Our benefactor shrugged and told us to load everything into his truck and hop in the back.

The couple took us to their tract house in Salt Lake City; we were welcome to stay with them, they said, but we'd sleep in the garage so we wouldn't disturb their two little girls. The next morning, our host scoured the classified ads for a used car. He spotted a promising Dodge station wagon with a funky push-button transmission. It had 100,000 miles, needed a little work—and cost $200. We went to see it. It was an improvement on my Olds, especially after our host spent the weekend tuning the Dodge, replacing hoses and filters, cleaning the carburetor, and changing the fluids and tires. Two days after our freeway flameout, we were roadworthy again.

We packed up our wagon and said goodbye. The little girls gave us hugs, the mom packed sandwiches and brownies, and the man shook our hands and wished us well. Assuming that a spiritual commitment was behind these acts of goodness, I had inquired about his faith while we worked on the car. No, he'd chuckled, he was a lapsed Mormon. I remember thinking that whatever his beliefs, he had certainly been a Good Samaritan.

But then, that's what we Americans are, aren't we?

Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting our country in 1831, was impressed by Americans' willingness to help those in need. "If some great and sudden calamity befalls a family, the purses of a thousand strangers are at once willingly opened," he wrote in Democracy in America. The young Frenchman even spoke to my misfortune: "If an accident happens on the highway, everybody hastens to help the sufferer."

So it has been throughout our history. Both times that Europe erupted in war in the 20th century, America sent food and medicine by the shipload before-and after—we sent soldiers. During World War I, the American Relief Association, headed by Herbert Hoover, almost certainly saved more European lives than did the doughboys commanded by U.S. Army Gen. John J. Pershing. After World War II, President Truman prevailed on Hoover to reprise his role, again averting mass starvation in Europe.

Americans are a giving people. We donate hundreds of billions to charity every year. And we do so even when we are pressed ourselves: A Gallup poll taken just before Christmas showed that 84 percent of us had donated to charity in the previous 12 months—just a tiny downward tick from three years ago, when Gallup last did the same survey.

George H. W. Bush gave a lyrical simile to our helping spirit: "a thousand points of light." His son George W. spoke of our "armies of compassion." Highlighting our national trait of generosity has been a priority of presidents from the beginning of our nation, both on a public and personal level. George Washington sent $25 to the pastor of two Presbyterian churches in New York as a significant gesture "toward relieving the poor," in his words.


"Giving is an American tradition," says Arthur C. Brooks, author of Gross National Happiness, a book in part about the reciprocal satisfaction that philanthropy gives.

I had little knowledge of such things during my college years. Before pulling out of Salt Lake City, we thanked our hosts profusely—but how do you really repay a family of strangers for bailing you out of a bad situation? In our youthful ignorance, we neglected even to write down their address, and by the time we arrived in California, we had forgotten their names.

And yet our good fortune in Utah left its mark: I rarely passed by anyone in need on the freeway again. After school, I married, had children, and landed jobs in Colorado, Georgia, and California before I came east to Washington, D.C., in 1982. One night, while fighting Beltway traffic on a miserably cold night in a driving rainstorm, I saw three kids huddled together out of the corner of my eye.

It was wet and dark and took me a couple of hundred yards to pull over. They saw my brake lights and came running, hesitating as they approached my pickup. They were a bit younger than my teenage brother, his friend, and I back in '73.

"Hop in," I said. They did, and I asked where they were headed.

"Little Rock!" one of them replied delightedly.

I cocked an eyebrow, and one of the boys said, "This is Virginia, right?"

"Yes," I replied.

"Good! Virginia is in the South—and so is Arkansas."

"Where are you boys from?" I asked.

"New Jersey."

I told them that Arkansas and Virginia had indeed both been in the Old Confederacy, but they were about a thousand miles apart. I asked if they had money or a place to stay—they had neither—and I realized that they were in the same kind of predicament we'd been in on Interstate 80 a dozen years before.

Cell phones were still not common, nor were ATMs. But my mother lived nearby, so I took them to her house and came out bearing sandwiches, a six-pack of Coke, and some camping gear that I'd stored at my mom's house: two old sleeping bags, three rain slickers, and a flashlight.

I gave it all to them, plus all the cash I had, about $80, which at the time was enough for a couple of nights at a roadside motel. I also gave them a map from my glove compartment and drove them an hour to a truck stop in Gainesville, Virginia, next to a well-traveled route heading south.

On the ride out, one of the guys asked me why I was doing this for them. I told them of my own experience in Utah and how I had never properly thanked the man who had helped us—that this was the best way I knew to repay his kindness. The boys got quiet. One of them wrote down my name and address. But one of the others seemed to really take in the spirit of the moment.

"I know what you're saying," he said. "One day when we're older, we'll come across some stranded kids—and we'll help them."

Yes, I thought, you will. It's what Americans do.