One characteristic of Americans is that they have no tolerance at all of anybody putting up with anything. We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed.

Mead contrasts what she saw as a distinctively American cultural disposition—impatience with resignation—with societies where enduring hardship may be normalized or even valorized. The remark frames “tolerance” not as open-mindedness but as willingness to put up with malfunction, injustice, or inefficiency. In her anthropological lens, this becomes a national habit of reform: if something is wrong, it is assumed to be alterable through practical action, policy, or invention. The quote can be read both as praise (a bias toward problem-solving and social change) and as critique (a limited capacity for endurance, ambiguity, or acceptance of constraints).