American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  These city-dwelling, or Pueblo, Indians lived in terraced apartment buildings made of adobe and supported by stones and wooden beams. The size and complexity of the pueblos reflected the engineering skills and social organization that were fixed in the Pueblo heritage. Some of these buildings were five hundred years old. Inheriting also a fine artistic tradition, the Pueblos fashioned marvelous pots and baskets and some of the finest rugs and blankets in the world. Since the men were not hunters—warriors were not honored and, indeed, were cursed by their victims—men as well as women spun, wove, potted, and farmed.

  Not all the southwestern Indians were peaceful farmers. The Navajos and, to an even greater extent, the Apaches hunted and marauded as well as farmed. California Indians were generally agrarian, and the Kwakiutls, far up the Pacific coast, were ferociously competitive and even cannibalistic. The native Americans, indeed, were an extraordinarily diverse array of peoples. But this did not stop most Americans of the late nineteenth century from seeing them through dime-novel eyes, stereotyping all Indians as fierce, marauding, thieving aliens. This conception, coupled with the Indians’ fear of white aggression and their distaste for most white ways, appeared to justify to whites their instinct to cast the Indians aside, to segregate them or to massacre them.

  Thus was there developed not only one more caste in the American caste system, but a caste that was completely cut off from other Americans experiencing poverty, discrimination, oppression, and segregation. Before the war, it had seemed at least barely conceivable that the great numbers of Americans denied their moral claims to “liberty and equality” might join hands to some degree, if only because there were leaders like Frances Wright and certain abolitionists who could imagine a coalition of the deprived. But later in the century, any kind of political or even symbolic alliance among Jews, blacks, Indians, and the ghetto poor was not only impossible; it was inconceivable. Not only were these castes segregated from one another, each hardly knew the others existed. The concept of unity seemed to be fading out just when the conditions of work and life should, according to Marxist calculations, have promoted class solidarity. Instead the power of ideas seemed to be pulling in very different directions.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Power of Ideas

  LIBERTY! A HUNDRED FOURTHS of July broke loose yesterday to exalt her name, and despite the calendar rolled themselves into a delirious and glorious one,” rhapsodized the usually dour New York Times. “At daybreak the city stirred nimbly and flung a million colors to the heavy air, for the cloud king had covered the heavens and moved upon the waters; but she plumed herself and showered scarlet, and snow, and azure, and gold, defying the skies to darken her festival.”

  Thus the Times pictured the dedication of the Statue of Liberty on a wet and foggy October 28, 1886. The massive icon represented a triumph of the human spirit as well as of the spirit of liberty. French intellectuals, struggling to establish a new republic out of the ruins of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, had conceived the mad notion of a joint French-American project to erect a colossal statue of liberty as a stimulus to both peoples to cherish and safeguard freedom. They sought the common denominator between “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” and “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Countless obstacles arose. Bartholdi, the sculptor, was noted more for his addiction to colossi than for his art. Viewing the project with suspicion, Congress granted funds for the dedication (but none for liquor) and for maintenance (as a lighthouse), and then cut off further aid. The public was importuned for funds, which the poor withheld because they viewed “Liberty” as a folly of the rich, but the rich did not give either. Still, some money was raised through auctions, benefit performances, and even a poetry contest, which attracted a reluctant contribution from one Emma Lazarus. And at a critical moment Joseph Pulitzer, an immigrant from Hungary, used his New York World and his St. Louis Post-Dispatch to pull in small gifts from over 100,000 donors, including countless schoolchildren.

  So there the great figure stood, rising with her torch 152 feet above the pedestal on Bedloe’s Island, 300 feet above sea level. Troops, bands, Templars, veterans, dignitaries disgorged onto the tiny island from ferry, tug, and yacht. The rich, now enthusiastic, were there, while the contributing public watched from the shores or excursion steamers. Count de Lesseps presented the gift. A senator—William Evarts—was celebrating Franco-American love of liberty when Bartholdi, perched far above on the head of the statue, acted on a false signal through the mists, unveiled the figure, and set off a cacophony of shouts, whistles, drums, horns, applause, and booming guns that drowned out the rest of the senator’s remarks. A President—Grover Cleveland—accepted the gift, stating that “Liberty has here made her home” and would pierce the darkness of ignorance and oppression “until liberty shall enlighten the world.”

  Liberty. The idea had doubtless lost some of its enkindling power of old, but it was still the central and most compelling value in the American ideology. The pennies and nickels that jangled in newsboys’ pockets still bore the magic word. Politicians still climaxed their declamations with appeals to the goddess of liberty, as did student orators evoking memories of the liberty of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and above all Daniel Webster—“Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”

  In the post-Civil War years, the American idea of liberty was as complex, many-sided, and ambiguous as in the antebellum period, when diverse notions of freedom probably did more to divide than to unite Americans in dealing with the issue of slavery and its cure. Liberty still meant, most fundamentally, freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. It meant, even more powerfully, the right to own and use your “private” property as you wished. Property, John Adams had said, was “surely a right of mankind as really as liberty,” and this idea flourished in a booming era of huge agglomerations of property. Liberty was still viewed in largely negative terms, as liberty from church and state and other establishments; the idea of achieving broader liberties, economic and social, through collective efforts, especially through government, was a matter more of philosophical debate than of practical consideration.

  Ideas have consequences, but not merely because they exist as abstractions. They must be evoked and articulated and sounded forth, like music from a score. The social and intellectual context of the 1870s and ’80s was such as to enhance the individualistic component of liberty—the emphasis on protection of individual rights, individual opportunity, private property as essential to a person’s security and dignity, the curbing of external obstacles on individual development. But this kind of “individualistic liberty,” or individualism, embraced a wide span of human thought and behavior—all the way, at least, from Emerson’s spacious concepts of personal growth and fulfillment, spiritual and intellectual, to the narrowest kind of material self-seeking and success.

  In a curious way, the Statue of Liberty itself seemed to symbolize both the power and the ambiguity of the idea of liberty in America. Bartholdi and his fellow republicans in France had conceived of the icon as Liberty facing away from America and “enlightening the world”—especially reactionary Europe. Emma Lazarus’s noble words had Liberty turned toward arriving immigrants as persons seeking a new life away from the old country. Was Liberty more for export abroad or for internal use? And what did it mean, in this dedication year of 1886?

  Across the Atlantic, in London, Karl Marx had viewed with scorn this kind of paean to liberty—bourgeois liberty. He had long since denounced bourgeois liberty as that “of man regarded as an isolated nomad, withdrawn into himself.” The right of liberty under capitalism was simply the right of private property—“the right to enjoy one’s fortune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest…. It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty….”

  DINNER AT DELMONICO’S

  Americans had long been world-famous f
or their competitive spirit and enterprising ways. A century and a half before Carnegie and Swift made their millions, young Benjamin Franklin was selling thousands of copies of his Poor Richard’s Almanack, which instructed that God helps them that help themselves, that Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee, that The used key is always bright, that Early to bed, etc. In Franklin’s time and after, however, overly bumptious entrepreneurial spirit had been checked and balanced by elitist public leadership, intellectual authority, legal due process, and civic virtue. Then the “victory” of the Northern economy in the Civil War and the long economic boom of the postwar decades brought a dynamic combination of a quickened spirit of individual enterprise—and a recharged doctrine of laissez-faire economics.

  Central to the whole concept of aggressive economic individualism was this doctrine of “government let be”—a doctrine that had gripped the British and continental business mind at the turn of the century. The physiocrats of eighteenth-century France had contended not only that land was the basis of all wealth but that the “natural order of liberty” would flourish best in a setting of absolute freedom of trade, full rights of property, and abolition of restrictive laws. These ideas had profoundly influenced Adam Smith, who planned at one time to dedicate his Wealth of Nations to François Quesnay, the founder and leader of physiocracy. In publishing this quickly famous volume in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, Smith issued an economic declaration of individualism—one that fell happily on the ears of businessmen frustrated by the old mercantilist regulations.

  The brilliant (if by no means original) constellation of ideas—that the natural economic order tends to maximize individual well-being, that this order must not be interfered with, that collective as well as individual betterment results from that order, that if enterprisers were free to pursue self-interest, the “invisible hand” of commercial competition would be far more effective than the state as a regulator of economic behavior—closely influenced the practical policies of parties and politicians, especially in Britain. Smith’s notions received powerful support from Thomas Malthus’s contentions that population, especially among the lower classes, constantly tended “to increase beyond the means of subsistence,” and that not poor laws but only the poor themselves could meet this problem. Another corollary to laissez-faire doctrine was David Ricardo’s “iron” law of wages, decreeing that the total wage fund was fixed and hence any successful effort by workers to increase their wages simply robbed other workers of income.

  These men were not scribblers in garrets but prestigious political and economic philosophers whose words carried enormous weight among ruling establishments. And they reached the minds of wellborn Americans at perhaps the most vulnerable stage of their lives—in their undergraduate years. Students at Brown University could listen to their president, Francis Wayland, defend the rights of property, proclaim that men should be allowed to use their capital as they wished, virtually equate the laws of laissez-faire economics with the laws of God; if the students missed Wayland’s sermons and lectures, they could read any of eighteen editions of his Elements of Political Economy. The men of Bowdoin could read a volume of the same title by their great preacher and teacher Samuel Phillips Newman, based on the principles of classical economics, just as the men of Harvard could peruse a textbook on the principles of political economy by their young philosopher-economist Francis Bowen, with similar conclusions, and the men of Williams could learn the same doctrines from their young political economist, Arthur Latham Perry.

  Through teachers like these—and countless others north, south, and west—college men drank in the thoughts of Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, of Jean Baptiste Say and Harriet Martineau, thinkers who themselves had absorbed the great individualistic and libertarian doctrines of Locke and his successors. If the American teachers were sometimes more Smithian than Smith, more Malthusian than Malthus, their students hardly cared. The young men embraced with fervor doctrines that seemed so well to fit the times. Practical politicians were often less ardent as they weaved their course between governmental hands-off and governmental intervention in the economy, but the practical men too, perhaps unknowingly, were the intellectual slaves of various economic theorists, alive or defunct.

  Individualism could be a spacious and noble doctrine; it could be a crabbed and selfish one. In America it was both. It was the individualism of Jefferson, of free and responsible persons rationally and collectively seeking the good life and the just society; it was also the individualism of the market economists, of those competitors in the economic arena seeking to make money and attain personal success, on the theory that a good society would arise out of the struggle for individual reward. The individualism of Jefferson had been an enormously liberating and democratizing force, encouraging movements for more social equality, suffrage for poor men, and even freedom for slaves.

  What happened after the Civil War in American elitist and popular thought alike was the steady divesting of individual liberty’s broader, richer dimensions and their replacement by a narrow, egoistic individualism defined as competition, striving, and personal success. What Clinton Rossiter called the “Great Train Robbery of American intellectual history” became the means by which postbellum rugged individualists stole the word symbols of Jeffersonian liberalism, such as liberty, equality, progress, and opportunity, and glued them onto the platform planks of conservatism.

  These refurbished planks would undergird American conservatism for at least a century. The higher, immutable laws of economics: anyone believing in a benevolent deity, said Edward Atkinson, must know that the operation of the higher law is “steadily, surely, and slowly working to the benefit of the great mass of the people.” Man as homo economicus: persons were defined by their economic self-interest rather than by their social or aesthetic needs. “Political Economy,” John Stuart Mill had written in 1844, “considers mankind as occupied solely in acquiring and consuming wealth.” The free market as regulator: rents, profits, wages, prices were to be determined by the laws of competition. Government as the enemy: no matter how representative and democratic, government was meddlesome, incompetent, corrupt. “Men may vote as they please,” said a theologian, “but the laws of production and of trade are as inexorable as the law of nature.” Liberty as economic individualism: liberty, said the noted political scientist John W. Burgess, “is the absence of government in a given sphere of individual or social action.”

  Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard reincarnated, the Jeffersonian belief in lean government revised and revived, the laissez-faire classicists revisited—the resurgence of all these currents of economic thought should have been enough to empower economic individualists with all the intellectual authority they needed in order to press for their marketplace version of liberty. And so it did. Following the war, however, two English thinkers immensely fortified the convictions of American individualists.

  Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had burst upon the British scene in 1859. The first edition sold out within the day. Superbly explicated and massively supported, his thesis grounded the old theory of evolution on the propositions that a struggle for existence rages among the prodigal issue of organisms, that variations in the offspring helped certain plants or animals to survive and reproduce, and that these mutations spread to the whole species during succeeding generations. Popularly interpreted as a theory that man was descended from the apes, “Darwinism” promptly set off blazing disputes with “creationists” who believed in the fall of Adam and original sin. Darwin’s theory was further popularized, and the argument extended, when Herbert Spencer dramatized the principle of natural selection as “the survival of the fittest.” In a profusion of writings including ten weighty works of “synthetic philosophy,” Spencer laid out an anti-statist doctrine that he had earlier embraced as a young editor at the London Economist.

  Americans seemed cut off from these ideas by their absorption in the Civil War; then came the “Vogue of Spencer.” His
views that nature put all on trial and that the mentally as well as the physically weak perished; that true liberty consisted of every man having “freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not on the equal freedom of any other man”; that state interference to protect the weak or deprived violated the process of natural selection; that public schools, state insane asylums, state poor-houses, state boards of health, even state post offices, were suspect; that, happily, government would decay as civilization progressed—these ideas, comprising the most radical defense of laissez-faire ever heard in America, fell with the tinkling melody of an intellectual aphrodisiac on the ears of the social and economic elites of America.

  Why were they so incited by this far-off thinker—a man who had not even deigned to visit America—with his fastidious ways and intellectual arrogance, when they already had ample intellectual support in the “Manchester School” and other classic thought, in the laissez-faire view of some of their own Founding Fathers, in their own creed of individualism? In part because this was the Age of Science, and scientific discovery and thought had gripped the American mind as never before. Spencer, with his weighty treatises, seemed as scientific in applying the “survival of the fittest” to the social order as Darwin was in finding it in the natural.

  There was a deeper reason. The great philosophical expounders of laissez-faire had often showed a deplorable tendency to “go soft” when it came to practical applications. Fundamentally humane and enlightened men, they ultimately balked at denying state aid to the poor and the helpless. John Stuart Mill, the great apostle of liberty, seemed to be turning almost socialistic in some of his thinking. But not Spencer—he supported the most rigorous application of laissez-faire not only as economically correct but as socially and morally valid, because the result would be the perfection of the human race and the eradication of social evils.