American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves.…in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.…” So fierce and brutal was the strife of politics that “sensitive and delicate-minded persons” had to stand aloof, leaving the battle to the selfish.

  For Dickens, the supreme evil was slavery, and the supreme hypocrisy that of men who shamelessly displayed the Declaration of Independence, “which solemnly declares that All Men are Created Equal,” and then would censure a member of Congress for having once risen up and called out to the lawmakers, “A gang of male and female slaves for sale, warranted to breed like cattle, linked to each other by iron fetters, are passing now along the open street beneath the windows of your Temple of Equality! Look!” Where now, asked Dickens, was the pursuit of Liberty and Equality?

  Dickens traveled west, taking the canalboat across Pennsylvania and the famed portage railway over the Alleghenies. He was struck by Pittsburgh’s great ironworks—“like Birmingham”—and the “great quantity of smoke hanging about it.” He admired Cincinnati, the “prettiest place” he had seen save for Boston, and “honourably famous for its free-schools.” He marveled at the size of the Mississippi, an “enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees.” He admired the old French portion of St. Louis and fulfilled his “great desire to see a Prairie.” He was properly struck by Niagara Falls, and he took time to take a steamboat up the Hudson and then ride overland to Lebanon, where he inspected the Shakers and their austere community. But he had become increasingly fatigued and dispirited during the trip, and he seemed more repelled by the ugliness of the pious and “stiff-necked” Shaker matriarchs than impressed by their husbandry and fraternity.

  Always his thoughts returned to the blight of slavery. He copied scores of advertisements from the newspapers: “Ran away, Negress Caroline. Had on a collar with one prong turned down”…“Ran away, a black woman, Betsy. Had an iron bar on her right leg”…“Ran away, the negro Manuel. Much marked with irons”…“Ran away, a negro boy about twelve years old. Had round his neck a chain dog-collar”…“Detained at the police jail, the negro wench, Myrna. Has several marks of LASHING, and has irons on her feet”…“Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M”…“Ran away, a negro named Arthur. Has a considerable scar across his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the goodness of God.”…

  Reflecting on his travels in America, Dickens tried to sum up his estimate of the general character of the American people and their social system. He found Americans as a whole “frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate.” The more educated and refined, the more warm and ardent “to a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends.” But these qualities were “sadly sapped and blighted” among the great mass of men. Americans as a whole were too distrustful of one another; overly practical and impressed by “smart men,” no matter how rascally; dull and gloomy in temperament; subject to a vicious and rapacious press; and always meanly suspicious of worthy public men.

  “There’s freedom of opinion here, you know,” Dickens quoted Americans saying to him when he chided them on their suspicion of their governors. “Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached.” Dickens respected this independence, but he was appalled by the sweaty, stinking, spitting, venal, leveling tendencies of the American people.

  This burning question—equality in America—excited the curiosity of scores of European visitors in the 1830s and 1840s. And Americans were even more curious about what the visitors reported about them. Europeans, after all, had a detachment, a perspective, and a basis of social comparison no American observer could match; they were virtually anthropological in their merciless dissection of American manners and customs. Frances Trollope, with her sharp eyes for domestic manners, missed little, nor did Harriet Martineau, despite her ear trumpet through which people had to shout, nor did Fanny Kemble, with her special concern with the lives of women. Unhappily, the findings of these and a hundred other visitors were quite mixed.

  Americans were variously found to be friendly, generous, rude, vulgar, solemn, dull, cold, violent, selfish, boastful, thin-skinned, practical, curious, vigorous, unrefined, materialistic, anti-intellectual. But the findings were often so self-contradictory that the visitors seemed to be describing the human condition, not merely the American. In sum it was a portrait, in Edward Pessen’s words, “of a good-natured but essentially shallow man: clever but not profound, self-important but uncertain, fond of deluding himself, living almost fanatically for the flesh (although not knowing too well how), straining every fibre to accumulate the things he covets and amoral about the methods to be used, a hypocrite who strains at gnats and swallows camels, an energetic and efficient fellow albeit a small one, who takes comfort in—as well as his standards of behavior from—numbers.”

  The visitors noted the cosmetics of equality, but no one probed behind the superficial manners and customs to cut to the social bone of the real questions about equality in America: What kind of inequality existed, economic, social, political, or other? What was the awareness of inequality, as against the existence of it? To what extent did a rigid class or caste system exist, to what extent was economic and social mobility eroding these systems? No one even tried to come to grips with such major questions, save for an unrenowned twenty-six-year-old French aristocrat who journeyed to America with a friend in the spring of 1831.

  Born of noble parents who barely escaped the guillotine during the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville grew up in an aristocratic family that clung to the traditions of the Bourbons even while providing their son with a solid Catholic education, a fine library, and the opportunity to study the classics at the lycée at Metz and law in the courts of Paris. With a friend, Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville attended the lectures of François Guizot and absorbed the historian’s view that history was governed by inexorable laws and that the progress of bourgeois democracy was inevitable. Rejecting both the House of Bourbon and the Orléanist dynasty that came to power after the uprisings of 1830, the young lawyer, now a magistrate, decided with Beaumont on a long tour of the rising young republic to the west, ostensibly to study and report on the advanced penitentiary system that was believed to exist in the United States. They arrived in New York in mid-May 1831, during the growing conflict in Andrew Jackson’s first term over the question: Should “People” or “Property” rule?

  EQUALITY: THE JACKSONIAN DEMOS

  Looking for democracy and equality, Tocqueville plunged into a nation that was sharply unequal in its distribution of wealth. An hour’s carriage ride through any of the big cities of the East would show striking contrasts between the lives of the rich and the poor. Wealthy Americans lived in fine town houses; dined well on the best food served on imported china and silverware; spent lavishly for clothes, entertainment, travel. The very rich were attended by liveried servants. Not far away, in slums and stews, fifty or more poor families might live in a decaying tenement, with perhaps one privy. Scores of “destitute homeless wretches” had been seen “lying on bulks or under the sheds about the markets of New York and Philadelphia.” Debtors were still being thrown into jail. Five thousand paupers lived in the stews of Boston, not far from the mansions on Beacon Hill. In 1830 the most affluent 10 percent of the nation’s families probably owned at least two-thirds of the country’s total wealth.

  How
was it possible, then, for Tocqueville to report, in the very opening sentence of his Democracy in America, “Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people”? How could he speak of equal conditions? In part because paupers and nabobs were relatively few; the great bulk of Americans lived somewhere between the two extremes. In part because the extremes of poverty and wealth that Tocqueville had witnessed in Europe made American inequality seem relatively benign. In part because Tocqueville, perhaps searching for a kind of Jeffersonian arcadia, perceived Americans as mainly rural, middle-class, homogeneous, agrarian, and he little noticed the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization, with their enormous implications for equality in America.

  But the main reason Tocqueville and other observers underplayed the extent of inegalitarianism in America lay in the tendency of economic inequality to be tempered and cushioned, in both appearance and substance. The crucial fact was not the absence of class distinctions but the transcending of them, Henry S. Commager wrote; wherever men and women “met in typical gatherings—camp meetings, militia drills, Grange picnics, political conventions, church sociables, Chautauqua assemblies—they met on a basis of equality.” It almost seemed that the American male—in his typically slouching posture, in his eternal smoking and chewing and spitting in even the most refined places, in his constant and indiscriminate handshaking, in his habit of saying “Yes, sir,” to high and low—was trying to prove his membership in a great classless mass.

  The most striking social buffer was the decline of deference. Free Americans would not bow or scrape or pull their forelocks, no matter whom they were addressing. On this score the relationship of master and servant particularly impressed Tocqueville. He had heard that in the North, especially in New England, in contrast with the slave domestic service of the South, servants performed their duties “without thinking themselves naturally inferior to the person who orders them.” The servants had enough respect for themselves not to refuse their masters the promised obedience; on their part, masters “do not ask for marks of respect…; it is enough that, as servants, they are exact and honest.” The free-and-easy egalitarian way of Westerners in dealing with visiting notables was widely known, and doubtless influenced behavior in the East.

  It was not that Jacksonian America lacked classes. “There are upper classes and working classes,” John Quincy Adams told Tocqueville bluntly. Class distinctions were visible in dress, speech, grooming, carriages, housing, residence area, as well as in income, education, social status. Social lines grew rapidly in western cities too, Richard Wade noted, though not drawn as tightly as in the East. Seating in theaters was partitioned on the basis of class; even applause was given by class. The United States had the makings of a caste system, with black men enslaved in the South and segregated in the North, illiterate immigrants sealed off in the worst jobs and the poorest housing, women set apart politically and psychologically in their own class pyramid. Visiting the Tombs in the Bowery, Dickens asked a warden if he put men in the bottommost, unhealthy cells of this infamous jail, and was reassured: “Why, we do only put colored people in ’em.”

  Save for the blacks and the very poor, what Jacksonian America as a whole lacked was a class system—a stratified social structure that set people off into separate and conflicting ideologies, economic statuses, rigid social structures. Most Americans behaved as though they existed in a culture of equality, even though they also existed in an economy, and to a considerable extent a society, of inequality. They responded, in their class roles, not directly to economic reality but to their perception of their class status, to their perception of others’ class status, and to their perception of others’ perception of their own class position.

  Tempering tendencies toward class rigidity, to some degree, was the nation’s social inheritance: a large, open, bourgeois middle class, without an upper class of aristocrats or a lower class of proletarians. “The great advantage of the Americans,” Tocqueville observed, was that “they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so.” Born equal! The United States had no inherited nobility in the European sense; its farmers were not peasants in the French sense; its workers were not proletarians in the English sense. Tocqueville noted another reason for softened class lines—America’s vast lands and abundance: “Their ancestors gave them the love of equality and of freedom; but God Himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free by placing them upon a boundless continent.” Then too, poor Americans clung to the rags-to-riches myth. Stories were told of men who had struck it rich in land speculation, in banking, in manufacturing. A hard-working man could rise through the ranks, or if opportunity were closed to him, he could move west. “In America,” Tocqueville reported, “most of the rich men were formerly poor.”

  The young Frenchman exaggerated. Neither social nor geographical mobility was as simple as he and many Americans thought. Wealth, jobs, and status were inherited by sons enjoying special access to colleges, family connections, social networks, their fathers’ wills. Going west and buying a farm required more money than most poor men had. But Tocqueville, with his usual insight, understood the myths that moved Americans, if not always the hard facts that validated or eroded the myths. And the heady idea of the self-made man was at the heart of the mystique of Jacksonian Democracy.

  Tocqueville had come to America to see democracy at work, for in the young republic, he believed, “the demos ruled in its unadulterated state.” Democracy in America, he decided, was inexorably producing powerful egalitarian impulses and conditions, because democratic societies in general tended more and more toward equality and “dragged” everyone along with it. To some degree he welcomed this trend; “…after all,” he said, “it may be God’s will to spread a moderate amount of happiness over all men, instead of heaping a large sum upon a few.” But even more he feared probable consequences of egalitarianism: a vast leveling down, conformity, mediocrity, one large, homogeneous middle class without “poetry or elevation.” All this in turn would lead to something Tocqueville feared most of all—the “tyranny of the majority.”

  Leveling and mediocrity also discouraged great leadership, Tocqueville felt. He wrote of the brilliant leadership, a generation earlier, of Thomas Jefferson and his Federalist adversaries. These were men of principle, with lofty ambitions for themselves and their country. But if America had once had great parties and leadership, she had them no longer; men were occupied by their petty, material ambitions, and the country “swarms with lesser controversies.” Doubtless Andrew Jackson in the White House seemed a narrow and quarrelsome figure to the young French aristocrat. He had to grant Jackson’s skill and tenacity, however, in standing by his policies and arousing popular support.

  In fact, the nation had strong leadership in the first cadre of Jackson and the other national Democratic figures like Van Buren and Benton, and in their great Whig antagonists like Clay and Webster. It had a robust second cadre of congressmen, state officials, partisan newspaper editors, party managers, federal and state officials, who carried on healthy, partisan combat. The vital test of Tocqueville’s fears about leadership lay in the third cadre—the grass-roots activists who sustained and invigorated democracy at its foundation.

  A remarkable mushrooming of grass-roots leadership occurred in a group that might have seemed least potent in a nation still mainly agricultural—the working people of the big eastern cities. Ever since the Revolution, craft unions had been organizing, agitating for better conditions, conducting strikes and boycotts, and then usually disappearing after a brief existence. Trade unionism revived in the more liberal and democratic climate of the 1820s. In 1824 weavers seeking higher wages left their looms in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in the first known strike of women workers. By this time tailors, carpenters, cordwainers, hatters, riggers, and other cr
aftsmen had formed somewhat durable unions. Working people were reaching out toward wider unities. After fifteen Philadelphia unions in 1827 banded together to form the first city central trade council, unionists in a dozen other cities moved to organize their own.

  Local union leaders became more and more aware, as Jackson and other national leaders battled over issues of concern to working people, that they could not realize their goals through trade union action alone, but must enter the political arena as well. Here again, Philadelphia workers led the way, forming a workingmen’s party out of the central trade council in 1828. Suddenly other movements, calling themselves workingmen’s parties, People’s Party, Farmer’s and Mechanic’s Society, or just Working Men, were springing into life in scores of cities in Pennsylvania, New York, New England, Ohio, and elsewhere. Typically these parties advanced a broad range of political demands: abolition of imprisonment for debt; equal, free, tax-supported, universal education; prohibition of licensed monopolies; equal taxation on property; revision or abolition of the militia system (which bore heavily on workers); and often a host of local needs, such as better working conditions and more “hydrant water” for the poor.

  Leaders of these workers’ parties knew what they wanted; the question was how to get it. And here the parties took a drastic step that set them off from a multitude of other interests pressing their demands. This was to nominate their own candidates for office, and then elect them. Such a strategy not only required a massive electoral effort from relatively small organizations, but presented the leaders with endless practical and philosophical dilemmas. Should they operate completely separately from political parties—that is, maintain their doctrinal purity at the expense of being isolated, or at least outvoted, politically? If they cooperated with existing political parties, on what terms? To what extent should the workers’ parties broaden their own ranks beyond their own trade union members? To what extent should they press for policies that would benefit the general public, or at least the poor, and not unionists alone? Should the parties actually try to win elections, or act mainly as goads and gadflies to the existing major parties?