American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  If an air of old-fashioned morality hung over the bishops’ letter, some of the solutions too sounded old-fashioned to some critics. In calling for help to the needy abroad the bishops appeared to ignore findings that a great deal of American aid, instead of helping the poor in Third World countries, had come under the control of powerful and rich elites who portioned it out among themselves. Thus the American poor to some degree were subsidizing the foreign rich. And when the bishops proposed empowering the poor, at home and abroad, critics noted that it was precisely in power, among other things, that the poor were poor; they might not know how to gain and exert power effectively any more than they were able to gain and spend money. In many other respects too, solving poverty was extraordinarily difficult. But the bishops would hardly have denied this.

  In any event, few were listening, or at least acting. Three years later the richest 1 percent of American families were approaching the peak share of the nation’s wealth of 36 percent attained in 1929. For the poorest 20 percent of American families, annual incomes in real dollars were one-third less than in 1972. Almost half of the new jobs created during the decade paid less than a poverty income. The stock market, however, was booming, and millions of middle-class Americans were engaged, like their government in Washington, in a spending spree.

  As it turned out, the two-hundredth birthday of the Constitution in 1987 was an occasion much more for celebration than cerebration. Serious debate about the Constitution was minimal, except for one unplanned episode. Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork for the High Court provided a classic demonstration of the type of presidential-congressional struggle so carefully planned by the Framers, and provided also a Senate forum for debate over major constitutional issues such as “original intent.” But those who hoped that 1988—the opening, year of the Constitution’s third century—might prove an occasion not only for testing Reagan conservatism at the polls but also for debate over sharply posed constitutional issues were to be disappointed on both counts. Major governmental restructuring occurred that year not in Washington but in the Soviet Union.

  The electoral politics of 1988 turned out to be a disgrace to an “advanced democracy.” After spending hundreds of days on the campaign road and millions of dollars before a single vote was cast, two coveys of candidates, Democratic and Republican, underwent a series of primary elections so rife with opportunism, so repetitious, and finally so anticlimactic as to bore the electorate before the main campaign even started. Two conventions full of fervid oratory but void of dramatic roll-call votes merely ratified the results of the primaries. The campaign that followed was the most scurrilous in recent American history, the most intellectually degrading since the campaign of bias against Al Smith in 1928.

  A principal reason for George Bush’s victory, studies indicated, was general satisfaction on the part of most voters with what the Democrats called the “credit-card economy.” Most respondents in a nationwide poll during the early fall of 1988 said that they viewed themselves as better off than they had been eight years earlier, and most expected to be still better off four years hence. Few heeded warnings of future economic disarray or collapse as the trade and federal budget deficits continued to soar. Basic also to the Bush victory was a large and solid conservative constituency; 42 percent of the respondents in an August CBS News/New York Times poll held that the Reagan Administration’s approach had not been conservative enough. Perhaps decisive in the outcome, however, was the GOP’s expert manipulation of media, money, and symbols, and of the Republican candidate himself.

  Long before election day, large numbers of voters were protesting the low level of the campaign. Many resolved on principle not to vote for president. An unprecedented number of newspapers refused to endorse either candidate. Voter registration campaigns floundered; after all the pronunciamentos about the biggest registration drive yet, the percentage of eligible Americans who were registered to vote by election time had dropped over two percentage points from four years before. And on election day the voter turnout—the ultimate test—fell to 50 percent, the lowest rate since the Coolidge-Davis race in 1924.

  The Bush Republicans had proved that Reaganism could win without Reagan. They had failed, however, to convert presidential Republican votes into congressional or gubernatorial majorities; indeed, the Democrats gained small increases in their Senate, House, and statehouse ranks. One test for President Bush—a former chairman of the Republican National Committee—was whether he would now prove able to further modernize the GOP even while he sought to draw more Reagan Democrats into the party. Still, the Republicans had shaped a conservative, Sunbelt-based electoral strategy that worked in 1988.

  And the response of the defeated? Many Democratic party leaders still failed to comprehend that for over a decade the Reagan Republican party had been conducting ideological warfare against the Democracy as the party of liberalism; that the Republicans had won this war in election after election; that the Democratic party lacked bold, creative, and innovative ideas, instead beating a timid retreat into calculation, centrism, and consensus. The Democracy would face huge tasks: to democratize and invigorate both its internal organization and the governmental system itself; to approach women, blacks, labor, peace activists, environmentalists and others less as vote pools to be tapped and more as partners in continuing social experimentation and change; to draw to the polls tens of millions who are, demographically, potential voters for the liberal-labor-left—if given inspired leadership of Rooseveltian quality.

  Intellectually this would demand of the Democrats a clearheaded array of values and a grasp of priorities and relationships among values, thus filling the “Tocquevillian void” with a structure of well-formed ideas, experiments, and policies. “If you go back and read William James on pragmatism,” scientist Michael Maccoby once remarked to some colleagues, “what he said was that truth would be discovered neither by the tough-minded people who live by numbers nor the tender-minded who live by ideology, but rather by people who make their ideals explicit, are willing to test them out and experiment with them constantly in the real world. That was really the essence of the American experiment.” But what truth had the American experiment established? “Politics in the United States,” wrote historian Alan Brinkley, “always has been afflicted with a certain conceptual barrenness. Efforts to create meaningful ‘values,’ to find a useful ‘moral core’ for our public life have competed constantly and often unsuccessfully against the belief in liberty, the commitment to personal rights unconstrained by any larger conception of a common purpose.”

  The volatility of the American character by the 1970s, Maccoby said, “makes the role of leadership absolutely crucial,” measured by both clarity of values and the experimental attitude. Yet transformative political and intellectual leadership had been conspicuously absent in the seventies and eighties, especially on the left. Was there still a place in the American scheme for the leader who could transcend the medley of special interests, carry through great projects, and provide creative and transforming leadership to the nation? Much would depend on the propulsive force by which leadership would be projected into office. Backed by a broad and militant mandate, such leadership would have a chance. Whether such a mandate would develop in the 1990s was not clear. Believers in the pendulum theory of politics now expected a great shift toward the left, but history has been known to play tricks on people with patterns. Leadership was not in automatic supply.

  Americans had no need for a hero, a spellbinder, a messiah. They needed committed men and women who could mobilize, and respond to, tens of thousands of rank-and-file leaders who in turn could activate hundreds of thousands of persons in the neighborhoods and precincts, thus creating a movement. This movement would both guide the top leaders and sustain them, just as hundreds, then thousands of black militants had rallied behind King and pressed him toward ever bolder action. Americans needed political leaders who, like Roosevelt on the left and Reagan on the right, could merge move
ment leadership with party and electoral organization, in order to win and hold governmental power.

  Such leadership, such followership, can be founded only on intellectual and moral commitment to values and principles, to ideology in the true sense of the word. In the United States it can be founded only on the values of liberty and equality, of freedom, that Americans have been extolling for two centuries or more. Most conservatives will define freedom as individualism and libertarianism, most liberals and radicals as the Four Freedoms, as sharing and solidarity. That is a rational basis for conflict. During the next political cycle, in the wake of Reagan conservatism, it would enable a leader on the left to have a special rendezvous with destiny—as President to confront the oldest continuing challenge in America: the broadening of real equality of opportunity combined with the expansion of individual liberty.

  Bob Dylan had sung in 1963:

  The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast

  The slow one now will later be fast

  As the present now will later be past

  The order is rapidly fadin’

  And the first one now will later be last

  For the times they are a-changin’

  Memories of the Future: A Personal Epilogue

  THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF my study I can see a field of goldenrod and purple aster glowing softly in the sun of early fall, then coming to an abrupt end a quarter mile away against a dark-green line of austere, impenetrable oaks and maples. Above the trees looms the great bulk of Mount Greylock, landmark for the northern Berkshires. To the east of Greylock there is a saddle in the Hoosac Range over which Shays’s rebels fled to a brief Berkshire refuge after they were cannonaded and routed in an attack on the Springfield arsenal over two centuries ago. Famous and infamous men and women have traveled through the valley beneath me—perhaps from distant Boston over the old Mohawk Trail or from the Hudson River lowlands to the west where the Dutch settled more than three centuries ago.

  Henry David Thoreau first spied Greylock in 1844 when he tramped across the Hoosac Range, picking raspberries by the wayside. In the valley he packed rice and sugar into his knapsack and, with thunder rumbling at his heels, he trudged up through the open fields that then mantled Greylock. Then the wayfarer picked a path through trees that had a “scraggy and infernal look, as if contending with frost goblins.” He reached the summit by dusk. In the soft green valley below, he remembered, he found “such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise.”

  From the summit Thoreau could see fifteen miles south to the town of Pittsfield. There, hardly a decade later, another young author looking north could view Greylock at its widest girth. Breaking through the clouds from the low mountains clustering around it, Greylock gave to Herman Melville the impression of a double-humped whale surfacing through ocean water. Melville’s mind was on whales—he was writing Moby-Dick. “I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country,” he wrote. “My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”

  Melville lived on a farm he named Arrowhead after he had plowed up Indian relics. During these years, the early and middle 1850s, Melville became good friends with another young writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived a few miles to the south in Lenox. The two often discussed their writing problems in Melville’s hayloft, between country romps with another local literary man, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hawthorne was still working on The House of the Seven Gables in his cottage called Tanglewood when Melville wrote the final pages of Moby-Dick.

  It was another half century before the area could boast of another writer of wide renown, Edith Wharton, and some decades after that of a poet of even greater fame, Robert Frost. Looking north from my front porch, I can see the first rises of Vermont’s Green Mountains enfolding Bennington, where Frost lies buried in a churchyard among the kind of woods and hills he loved. At the foot of the Green Mountains lies Williams College, where I have taught for almost fifty years and still serve and where we still sing an anthem that begins:

  O, proudly rise the monarchs of our mountain land,

  In their kingly forest robes to the sky.…

  And concludes:

  … The glory and the honor of our mountain land,

  And the dwelling of the gallant and the free.

  Glory, honor, gallantry—I have drawn a rather benign portrait of the Berkshires, of their natural beauty and early literary creativity. But this is also a region scarred by violence and long peopled by men going to war and—not all of them—returning. For centuries these green valleys were passages for Indian braves marauding their way into other tribal domains. To the east I can see the site of Fort Massachusetts, built in 1745 as the northwest outpost in a line of forts and stockades running back to the Connecticut River. Down the valley in front, close to the college, lies the site of Fort West Hoosac, built ten years later as defense against invading French and Indians. In 1756, during an intense attack on this fort, which the defenders repulsed, three Williamstown soldiers ventured out to search for some cows that had strayed. The men were cornered by Indians, killed, and scalped. Thus the first Williamstown casualties occurred within a few hundred yards of the slain men’s homes, much as at Lexington Green less than twenty years later a Minuteman crawled across the road from the killing and died on his front stoop under his wife’s eyes.

  Since that day Williamstown and other Berkshire men have gone off to war in an ever-widening arc of conflict. In 1777, the third year of the Revolution, over 150 Williamstown militiamen, armed with muskets, fowling pieces, scythes, and hatchets, marched fifteen miles to Bennington to join General Stark’s forces in their rout of Tories, Hessians, and Indians under General Burgoyne at the Battle of Bennington. In 1812 a few Williamstown men journeyed 200 miles or so to fight along the Canadian border. In the Civil War they entrained in large numbers to the killing grounds several hundred miles away; in the Spanish-American War they traveled a thousand miles to Florida, where some were stricken by typhoid fever and malaria; in 1917 and 1918 they sailed three thousand miles to France; in the early 1940s some flew six thoµsand miles across the Pacific to places like Okinawa and IwoJima; in the late 1960s they fought almost literally at the opposite end of the globe, in Vietnam. And—though one would certainly prefer otherwise—someday local men and women may fight tens or hundreds of thousands of miles away, in space wars.

  Neither in war nor in peace has Williamstown or the rest of Berkshire County given famous generals or Presidents to the nation, though a few were schooled here. But the Berkshires have supplied hundreds of the type of second-level leaders that are most crucial to a nation’s survival and progress. In 1766 Benjamin Simonds built the first tavern in Williamstown; later he took the lead in laying out the first church site, sired the first white child born in the town, and as colonel of the all-Berkshire regiment led it to Bennington. During his final years he helped clear the land and make the brick for the “Free School,” shortly renamed Williams College. Or consider the twenty-two Berkshiremen who were elected in the winter of 1787 as delegates to the Massachusetts convention to ratify the new Constitution, and who took part in an historic debate that led to the addition of the Bill of Rights to the new charter.

  During the next century the county contributed hundreds of educators, lawyers, ministers, businessmen, inventors who took leadership positions throughout the country. One of these was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born in Great Barrington in 1868. Harvard Ph.D., militant foe of Booker T. Washington’s palliative tactics, author of profound studies of African and American blacks, leader of pan-African unity efforts, in 1961 he joined the Communist party, renounced his United States citizenship, and moved to Ghana, where he died two years later. There his home is a shrine. His Great Barrington birthplace at last report was a weed-choked lot with a crude wooden plaque.

  Berkshire County is steeped in history, ben
ign or not. But so is every county in the United States. I grew up in a town north of Boston, in an expanse of farm and woodland where my nearest playmates were two miles away. Yet I could walk through woods behind my house for an hour, pass by a few homes including my girlfriend’s, and come onto Lexington Green, where the first Revolutionary blood was shed in April 1775. One can hardly visit any part of the United States without being struck by the richness of the local history. It simply remains to be discovered, in attics, people’s memories, yellowing newspapers, artifacts, local libraries. One is struck even more by the ubiquity of group conflict in the United States—between Indians and settlers, Yanks and Rebs, blacks and whites, farmers and sheriffs, workers and bosses, outlaws and inlaws. If one could put on a map of the United States tiny X’s denoting pitched battles, little else would show.

  In October 1988, at the height of the presidential campaign, I was reminded of an earlier October—in 1932, when, amid the darkening red leaves on the mountainsides, Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt drove into Williamstown on the road along which the Berkshire troops had once marched to Bennington. His limousine passed Ben Simonds’s old tavern and then slid through the college precincts, slackening its pace so that all could see the cheery, hat-waving governor, but it did not stop. Perhaps he had heard something about Williams students’ political leanings. When the car did halt just beyond the college bounds, a frustrated throng caught up, crying, “Speech! Speech!” But FDR appeared far more interested in conversing with the politicos who crowded around his car. When an arm-waving party chieftain called for “three cheers for the next President of the United States,” hearty shouts for Hoover and a few yells for Norman Thomas rose in the autumn air. Unperturbed, FDR and his party moved on.

  Later Roosevelt would set a standard for the presidency, in both its creative and its dangerous aspects. What has been less appreciated is the standard set by the “second-cadre” men and women around him, in the White House, his cabinet, his brain trust, his New Deal agencies. Frances Perkins and Harold Ickes and Thomas Corcoran and later George Marshall and Leon Henderson and always of course Eleanor Roosevelt have been celebrated enough—in part because many of FDR’s top people like Ickes and David Lilienthal were masterly diary-keepers—but the special greatness of these leaders lay in their capacity to draw a third cadre of leadership into the corridors of power.