American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  A marvelous line from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, noted by Malcolm Cowley, summed up the eloquence and the despair of modern human existence: “moving from a terror in which you cannot believe, toward a safety in which you have no faith.” This was the folly and impotence of America but by no means its essence.

  Robert Frost even more than Faulkner defined freedom in his sayings and writings as personal liberty against the state, whether New Deal bureaucracy or the compulsory public school. And his freedom too, on closer inspection, turned out to be the crucial but self-serving independence of the man of letters. “We prate of freedom,” he said. “All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material—the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.” And he wrote:

  Keep off each other and keep each other off.

  You see the beauty of my proposal is

  It needn’t wait on general revolution.

  I bid you to a one-man revolution—

  The only revolution that is coming.

  Many of Frost’s finest poems celebrated the independent, self-reliant, skeptical country man, who could say with the poet, “The freedom I’d like to give is the freedom I’d like to have.” But this was a negative freedom largely irrelevant to the human needs of millions of industrialized, urbanized, automated Americans. There was one thing Frost could not do, Granville Hicks had written earlier. He “cannot give us the sense of belonging in the industrial, scientific, Freudian world in which we find ourselves.” The poet never did, never wanted to.

  What writer, then, did manage to present the essence of the American experiment in the realm of ideas and values? Surely not Norman Mailer, who in the 1950s was still preoccupied with self-promotion, self-definition, self-resolution, with orgasm as true love, ideology as illusion, the hipster as the “wise primitive.” Surely not Tennessee Williams, who epitomized the decade’s concern with personal trauma and private values, or J. D. Salinger’s adolescents in constant rebellion against the “phony bastards” around them, or Saul Bellow’s characters—unforgettable but largely preoccupied with their own psyches.

  The writer who came closest to dramatizing the great public issues and values was a playwright. Manhattan-born Arthur Miller, the son of a garment manufacturer afflicted by the depression, rebelled against commercial values and middle-class hypocrisy much as his fellow writers did. But he used his characters to dramatize social as well as personal needs and failures. The “right dramatic form,” he wrote in 1956, “is the everlastingly sought balance between order and the need of our souls for freedom; the relatedness between our vaguest longings, our inner questions, and private lives and the life of the generality of men which is our society and our world.” His great plays—notably Death of a Salesman and The Crucible—were in part direct responses to the threat to people’s hopes and dreams from a business civilization that degraded them and the threat to personal liberty from McCarthyism. Predictably Miller was attacked from the right; more significantly, he was criticized from the left for not being radical enough, for not being clear whether it was Willy Loman who was at fault or the society that produced him, for not tying his plays more explicitly to current issues.

  Miller easily survived his critics. But even though his plays were produced in Europe, he had only a limited impact abroad. The ambiguities in his dramas—the ambivalences in Miller reflecting those in the larger culture—were enough to blur his powerful portrait of America’s yearnings toward both liberty and order, freedom and security, individualism and solidarity. The portrait was not clear to all Americans either. Miller himself wryly mentioned the man who came out of a performance of Death of a Salesman exclaiming, “I always said that New England territory was no damned good.”

  If American writers were unsure of what their nation stood for, it was not surprising that Europeans were equally puzzled. European intellectuals had long labeled the country’s commitment to freedom as either self-indulgence bordering on anarchy or a boorish egalitarianism bending toward class leveling. “I am held to be a master of irony,” George Bernard Shaw had gibed. “But not even I would have had the idea of erecting a Statue of Liberty in New York.” On the other hand, Europeans had to and did admire the American commitment to some notion of freedom in two wars and the cold war. If Europeans, with their long exposure to Americans, were left uncertain, what could be expected of the Soviets, with their very different, very ideological conception of freedom?

  A remarkable meeting in San Francisco in September 1959 between Nikita Khrushchev and nine American labor leaders headed by Walter Reuther helped answer this question. For two hours the two sides went at it, Khrushchev reddening, pounding the table, shouting out his arguments, the union men roaring back in a cacophony of indignant voices. More and more the argument narrowed down to the question of freedom—for workers in East Germany, for Hungarian “freedom fighters,” for West Germans, for Americans. Khrushchev was soon on his feet. Suddenly, according to the official record, he gave a burlesque demonstration of the dance he had witnessed during the Hollywood rehearsal of the forthcoming film Can-Can. He turned his back to the table, bent downward, flipped his coat up, and gave an imitation of the cancan.

  “This is a dance in which girls pull up their skirts,” the Premier fulminated. “This is what you call freedom—freedom for the girls to show their backsides. To us it is pornography. The culture of people who want pornography. It’s capitalism that makes the girls that way.”

  The meeting sputtered toward its end.

  “We are interested in how best to advance the interest of workers under freedom,” Reuther said.

  “You have your point of view; we have ours,” Khrushchev replied. “They are irreconcilable.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Free and the Unfree

  ONLY A TINY PORTION OF the people of the world had ever taken part in the global controversy over the nature of freedom. Yet, whether this lofty idea was defined in its core as individual civil and political liberty or as the broadest social and economic opportunity and equality, whether—in FDR’s terms—freedom was not only of speech and worship but also from want and fear, the meaning of freedom had enormous potential implications for the billions of people who were as remote from the controversy as if they lived on another planet.

  The vast majority of these persons lived in peasant huts or city shanties. They subsisted on 2,000 calories a day or even less, barely enough to supply the energy needed for bodily survival. In the cities they lived perforce on a day-to-day, even hour-to hour economy, as they scrounged for enough money or food to carry them through the day. In the country they lived seasonally, planting their single crops on postage-stamp plots, but were often at the mercy of landlords, moneylenders, drought, and flood. In time of dire need they might resort to begging, pilfering, to sending their children out to beg or toil. At best they might live four or five or six to a shack, often in curtained-off tiers of straw mats.

  The most eloquent world leader could not reach these people. They had no magazines, newspapers, or books—and could not read them if they had, for the great majority were illiterate. They might possess a radio, if they had electricity and if the national regime wanted a direct line to them; more likely they could attend a community radio or perhaps a film. Many blocks away, or across the valley somewhere, there might be a school—perhaps a two-room hutch for the hundreds of children in the area. Few attended— there were better uses for them. In southern India twelve-year-old untouchables bobbed up and down in lime pits stamping hides with their bare feet; elsewhere in Asia children might be sent out in time of famine to pick the undigested oats from horse droppings.

  Around the globe, wherever the sun was hottest typically the poverty was direst. Its burning rays brought light and energy but also drought and flood to southern Asia, to tropical and Saharan Africa, to Brazil and her neighbors to the west. The overhead sun traced the global hunger belt. In the late 1950s “developed�
� countries outside the communist bloc had less than one-fifth of the world’s population but over three-fifths of the world’s gross national product. The communist bloc including Asia claimed a third of the global population and a fifth of the GNP. That left the rest of the world—a billion and a third people—with the rest of the GNP, less than 15 percent. More starkly, about half the world’s population of almost three billion had a GNP per head of $100 or less by the end of the fifties.

  There was nothing new about this abject poverty; much of humankind had always been in dire want. It was the sheer number of people now inhabiting the earth, and therefore the sheer scope of privation, that was new. World population had climbed from less than 1.2 billion in 1850 to around 1.6 billion in 1900 and then surged to 2.4 billion by 1950. There was virtually no chance of slowing down the population increase in the next half century because it was propelled by almost inexorable forces: the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutions in personal and public hygiene, medicine, agriculture, industrial productivity. On the contrary, experts in demography fully anticipated a further population spurt during the late twentieth century.

  It was not simply a matter of numbers, however, but of the revolution in attitudes created by people having longer life spans, working more productively, living and toiling in denser clusters. These attitudes were focused and steeled by two powerful intertwined tendencies. One was the heating up of fierce nationalist feelings and rivalries that swept Asia and Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A sense of common fate “united peoples divided by older social barriers of ethnicity, class, rank, culture, religion,” in Peter Worsley’s words. “People drew together, and were forced together.” They united against their colonial masters; what they united for was not so clear. The other development was world war, accompanied by multitudinous smaller wars. Economically stimulated by the colonial powers’ ravenous exploitation of their natural resources, Third World peoples were also psychologically charged when the British and Americans appeared vulnerable to Third World nationalism. And vulnerable as well to other races: at Singapore, Pearl Harbor, and elsewhere, Oriental power—at least for a few electrifying months—seemed able to take the measure of the white master.

  “O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, / How will the Future reckon with this Man?” poet Edwin Markham had asked at the turn of the century after gazing at a reproduction of Millet’s The Man with the Hoe. How answer his brute question “when whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world”? When would the “dumb Terror” cry out? For the most part he did not. The man with the hoe stayed chained to his plot, his cottage, his village, his tribe, imprisoned in a structure of poverty embracing every aspect of his existence: his poor nourishment, ill health, ignorance, illiteracy, lack of motivation, opportunity, hope. Studies of Indian villages portrayed communities whose hierarchy of castes and classes appeared utterly impervious to external influence or internal disruption.

  Others revolted. They rose against their colonial masters or the local colonial surrogates or their own national or tribal despots. Some rebels, following the paths of the great liberal European leaders they had studied in their school textbooks, chose the course of party competition, voteseeking, parliamentary maneuver, cabinet leadership. Others turned to Marxist doctrines and Leninist tactics, focusing hatred against colonists, landlords, plantation owners, moneylenders, storekeepers—against all “capitalists.” The result had been a variety of communist and socialist regimes, some of them collaborating with the master models in Moscow and later Peking, others following their own nationalist versions of Marxism.

  The path that rising peoples followed was not chosen by the collective voice or vote of the people acting en masse. Nor on the other hand did one leader or a tiny set of leaders at the top make the decision. It came of shifting combinations of national leaders, grass-roots activists, and followers, varying from nation to nation, region to region. But at least one broad pattern could be discerned in this complex process. While “arousing the masses,” leaders inspired subleaders who tended to challenge and overtake the original leaders and then remove or even execute them. Thus revolutions devoured their own children. As leaders responded to wants and turned them into socially legitimated needs, people were not content for long; after food in their bellies and security in their homes they wanted higher things—self-esteem and self-fulfillment. Seeking votes, politicians offered people hope and found the collective hope they aroused turning into expectations that soon became entitlements that soon became demands. And once the followers put demands on their leaders and the leaders followed the followers, the followers were the true leaders.

  Other poverty-stricken people found a quite different way out—migration. For some this meant moving from the countryside into the burgeoning cities—or into the shacks that clustered in the city but were not part of it. For others, whether early immigrants such as the Irish or later ones like the Chinese, it meant voyages of several thousand miles across the high seas to new lives and new leaders, new freedoms and new frustrations.

  It so happened that during the 1960s, when demands for economic and social as well as political and constitutional freedoms were echoing throughout the Third World, Americans came under the leadership of two Presidents who—more than any of their predecessors for at least a century—had lived among migrant peoples who had come to the United States seeking liberty of thought and expression and equality of opportunity. John Kennedy had grown up among the descendants of the Irish who had fled from British oppression, and in his city constituencies he had seen people imprisoned in urban poverty that matched the rural deprivations of the old country. As a young schoolteacher, Lyndon Johnson had entered the lives of children descended from some of the several million Mexicans who had remained in the Southwest following the Mexican-American war or who had later crossed the border to find jobs. Could not these two Presidents take the lead in teaching the American people—and themselves—how to understand the cries for freedom rising from the Third World, and how to respond to them?

  The Boston Irish

  In the late 1840s the trickle of Irish immigrants into Boston had suddenly turned into a flood. In less than a decade over 120,000 Hibernians crossed over the gangplank and, full of wild hopes and apprehensions, descended into the tumult of the dock. The central cause of this sudden spurt could hardly have appeared more remote to the Brahmin world of Beacon Hill—yet it would profoundly alter that world. It was a fungus in Irish fields that left potato stalks slimy and stinking and the spuds underground small and mushy. The blight devastated Ireland’s single main crop. More than half a million Irish people died of starvation and related illnesses in the famine, it was estimated, while hundreds of thousands of others in fury and desperation sought escape to England, Canada, and America.

  It was not the first time that the Irish had wondered if God’s curse lay on their country. For centuries they had known oppression from the alien regime across the Irish Sea. Repeated rebellions had brought bloody reprisals and massacres. The Irish “always went forth to battle and they always fell,” a poet lamented. The English government had planted thousands of Presbyterian Scots in northern Ireland—a move that would divide the country for at least four centuries. Irish Catholics were denied the right to vote, to serve on juries, to teach school, to enter a university, to marry a Protestant, to own much land, to join the bar, to work for the government. Slowly, grudgingly, London made concessions, but it was all too late. By the early nineteenth century the Irish had turned inward, to their land, their family, their superstitions, their villages, their grievances, and above all their religion.

  It was a colonized people who made their way across the Atlantic, only to meet—in Boston, at least—new colonial masters. Here again were Protestant overlords who dominated intellectual and cultural life, occupied the economic and political power centers, controlled the major press organs, dominated the election process. Most of the Irish exchanged their hovels in Count
y Kerry for tenements off filthy alleys, their farm labor for pick-and-shovel jobs on roads or canals, or drudgery in Protestant kitchens or factories. But they did not exchange their church, their one dependable institution. The Irish in Boston continued to hunker down together, to cling to their songs and wakes and taverns, their sly ways of frustrating their oppressors.

  But something was different in America. It was a nation that appeared to prize its constitutional processes and Bill of Rights, a people that affirmed—even if they often failed to practice—the supreme principles of liberty and equality. And it was a land of bursting economic opportunity, however uneven. In many respects Boston, compared with the bustling cities to the south and west, was already experiencing an economic decline, but the city was a job cornucopia compared to the old country.

  The Boston Irish found three ladders out of privation. Sports was the handiest—literally handy for a man quick with his fists. Hero to Boston Irishmen was John L. Sullivan, who discovered his prowess at the age of nineteen by knocking his foe into the orchestra pit with his first blow. Sullivan took on all comers, promising $25 to anyone who could knock him out. In 1882 he vanquished the national heavyweight champion, Paddy Ryan; seven years later he fought Jack Kilrain for seventy-five rounds with bare knuckles; three years after that he lost the championship to Gentleman Jim Corbett and with it a purse of $45,000. So prestigious were Irish boxers that some aspiring pugilists without a drop of Irish blood took Hibernian names.

  For more ambitious Boston Irish, the main ladder was political. In the United States, Irishmen’s votes counted just as much as any others, sometimes more if counted by the right people. By the 1870s the Boston Irish were electing city aldermen and state legislators, then mayors and congressmen. Outdoing the Protestants in dispensing patronage, soon they were making their friends and supporters policemen, inspectors, firemen, and the like. With their ready tongues, their quick wit, their concern for families living in their ward or precinct if not for people en masse, their flair for building personal followings, their vaunted “human touch,” and with their numbers, the Irish soon captured Boston, except for brief periods of reform protest. Newcomers from other countries had many of these qualities too, but the Irish (or many of them) enjoyed one inestimable advantage—they were the only “new” immigrants to arrive speaking English.