Is Grit the American Virtue? (Phillip M. Pinell, 2/12/26, Ford Forum Observer)
For Mattie, grit means follow-through. It is the ability to do one’s job—however brutal—without flinching. Rooster’s violence is not admirable to her in itself, but it is evidence that he will persevere. Even this God-fearing young Presbyterian, no friend of vice, concludes that moral squeamishness is not a prerequisite for justice. Her father has been murdered. Justice requires the murderer be caught and hanged. Nothing more, nothing less. This is an Old Testament conception of justice, not as mercy to one’s enemy, but as measure-for-measure.
Yet as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Mattie possesses more grit than the man she hires. Despite Rooster’s attempts to leave her behind, she follows him into dangerous, unfamiliar terrain. She eats little, sleeps less, and refuses every opportunity to give up. Unlike Rooster, who is motivated by money, Mattie is animated by a righteous sense of duty. Her upbringing has made her the opposite of Rooster: law-abiding, methodical, stubbornly principled. And yet she, not Rooster, ultimately kills Chaney with her father’s own rifle.
This tension—between the lawless grit of Rooster and the principled grit of Mattie—captures something fundamental about the American character as imagined in our national mythology. If America is shaped by the dispositions of those who came before, Mattie embodies the perseverance of early American settlers and frontier families, the relentless Protestant insistence that injustice must be confronted directly, that one must not shrink from doing hard things oneself. Her world is set fifty years after Tocqueville’s travels, yet she would not look out of place in his account of the determined, self-reliant Americans of Jacksonian America.
The Western endures because it dramatizes this dual nature of American grit. Sometimes it manifests as admirable perseverance, sometimes as dangerous vigilante hardness. But it is unmistakably American in its insistence that adversity is not an excuse to retreat.