* * *
—
We should turn now from the Founders to the inhabitants of the garden itself, for the architects of the Constitution were ultimately their servants, both reflecting and guided by their spirit. Although the American colonists were culturally indebted to Britain, by the time of the Revolution, a new, distinct American character and culture began to manifest itself.
One reason the Founding generation could sift the gold from the dross of the English tradition was that they were alienated from it, literally and figuratively. Living thousands of miles across an ocean from their ancestral home, many of the cultural assumptions that seemed live and immediate when living in London or Manchester felt dead or distant in Boston or New York. Just as Texans don’t immediately look to Washington to solve their problems, the idea of looking across the Atlantic seemed increasingly irrational and cumbersome.
This alienation from the mother country had an added psychological component. As discussed, British primogeniture laws required that the firstborn son of an aristocratic family get everything: the titles, the lands, etc. But what about the other kids? They were required to make their way in the world. To be sure, they had advantages—educational, financial, and social—over the children of the lower classes, but they still needed to pursue a career. “The grander families of Virginia—including the Washingtons—were known as the ‘Second Sons,’ ” writes Daniel Hannan.
“Many of the younger brothers who had founded their lines in the New World had borne with them a sense of injustice that they had been denied any share of their ancestral lands through an accident of timing,” Hannan adds. This idea that primogeniture was a violation of natural justice was expressed by Edmund in King Lear:
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines
Lag of a brother?…36
In fact, Hannan and Matt Ridley suggest that much of the prosperity and expansion of the British Empire in the eighteenth century can be ascribed to an intriguing historical accident. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the children of the affluent nobility had a much lower mortality rate, for all the obvious reasons. They had more access to medicine, rudimentary as it was, but also better nutrition and vastly superior living and working conditions than the general population. As a result, the nobility were dramatically more fecund than the lower classes. Consequently, a large cohort of educated and ambitious young men who were not firstborn were set free to make their way in the world. If you have five boys, only one gets to be the duke. The rest must become officers, priests, doctors, lawyers, academics, and businessmen.
This is not an abstract point but a vital cultural and sociological one. European and English societies were drenched in notions of class. The English who valued that system often returned home to England or moved to Canada. The Americans who stayed kept the English attachment to natural rights and popular sovereignty, but they also rejected the cultural obsession with rank and status—and had a powerful attachment to liberty.
Seymour Martin Lipset, the great political sociologist and probably the greatest student of American exceptionalism since James Bryce or Tocqueville, had a wonderful observation about America. (I heard him share it many times.) At the time of the Founding, if you were a loyalist or royalist with no interest in severing ties with the British crown, you often moved to or stayed in Canada. If you believed in the principles of the Founding, you either stayed in America or moved there. This was one of the greatest natural experiments in political history. These were two populations with the same basic ethnic makeup, the same religious beliefs, and, for the most part, the same language. And yet these two nations produced two very different political cultures. Lipset loved to point out that, two centuries later, both the U.S. government and the Canadian government mandated that all of their citizens switch to the metric system. The Canadians, with their deeply ingrained deference to political authority, obliged almost instantly. “Drive around Canada,” he’d chuckle, “and everything is kilometers.” Not so in America. The U.S. government asked, but the answer was “No.”
This points to the revolution in culture the American founding represents. I think Gordon Wood is surely right that the significance of the Declaration of Independence at the time lay largely in the conclusion—independence!—rather than the introduction. But that does not mean the American Revolution was seen as just another conflict between empire and colony, or that America’s founding did not represent an earthquake in Western thinking even at the time. Europe’s monarchs and emperors recognized the American war for independence was not just another grubby revolt—though they often said it was, for propaganda purposes. “The rulers feared that their subjects would see the American action not as a rebellion against a rightful monarch in his own territories—there had been plenty of rebellions against European sovereigns—but as the proclamation of a revolutionary doctrine of universal application, as the Declaration indeed announced it to be,” wrote the late, great journalist Henry Fairlie.37 “Any notion that the War of Independence was only a rebellion falls to the ground. Both rulers and their subjects saw it as a revolution of universal appeal.”38
And the Revolution was not merely political. It also had economic motivations and consequences. “What the rebellious Americans wanted,” writes economic historian Robert E. Wright, “and with ratification of the Constitution obtained, was what today we call ‘economic freedom.’ In other words, they wanted to engage in entrepreneurial activities, subject only to necessary regulations and taxes, and credible assurances that they could keep whatever wealth those activities generated.”39
This is why, for the young Americans, economic and political liberties were indivisible. This was a radical expansion of even the British understanding of liberty, which, in practice, always tended to take the economic rights of nobles more seriously. Meanwhile, the rulers of Europe were aghast at the idea that merchants and strivers should undermine their sovereignty, which is why King George III lamented that his rule was being threatened by a bunch of “grocers.”40 Even Karl Marx declared that “the American war of independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class.”41
“The public here is extremely occupied with the rebels [in America],” the Danish foreign minister A. P. Bernstorff wrote to a friend in October of 1776, “not because they know the cause, but because the mania of independence in reality has infected all the spirits, and the poison has spread imperceptibly from the works of the philosophes all the way out to the village schools.”42
America had created a culture of liberty and equality never before seen. Paris, London, and Vienna each had their claims to financial, intellectual, or artistic freedom. But that freedom was often the freedom of the elites—of intellectuals, artists, writers, and aristocrats. In America, cultural freedom had been democratized. (This probably explains many of the differences between the French Revolutionary project and the American one. The French, accustomed to absolutism, were more inclined to replace one form of absolutism with another. In America, the people acquired a taste for liberty and demanded more of it than the English were willing to provide.)
In the Old World, your clothes, your accent—even your last name—were freighted with notions of superiority and inferiority. Sumptuary laws—codes for what garments people could wear and what products they could use—were largely repealed by the eighteenth century, but they endured as a kind of cultural and social uniform. Even in Britain’s comparatively democratic culture, people were still expected to dress in accordance with their station.
Not so in the United States. Thomas Colley Grattan, the British consul in Boston in the 1840s, disdained the peculiar culture of equality in the former colonies. Servant
girls, he complained, were “strongly infected with the national bad taste for being over-dressed, they are, when walking the streets, scarcely to be distinguished from their employers…”43 Ferenc Pulszky, a Hungarian politician touring America in 1852, was dismayed to discover that Americans rejected the unofficial uniforms of class. In Europe, there was “the peasant girl with the gaudy ribbons interlaced in her long tresses, her bright corset, and her richly-folded petticoat; there the Hungarian peasant with his white linen shirt, and his stately sheepskin; the Slovak in the closely fitting jacket and the bright yellow buttons; the farmer with the high boots and the Hungarian coat; the old women with the black lace cap in the ancient national style, and none but the young ladies appareled in French bonnets and modern dresses.” But in New York, he complained, “no characteristical costumes mark here the different grades of society, which, in Eastern Europe, impress the foreigner at once with the varied occupations and habits of an old country.”44
“Before the end of the nineteenth century,” Daniel J. Boorstin writes, “the American democracy of clothing would become still more astonishing to foreign eyes, for by then the mere wearing of clothes would be an instrument of community, a way of drawing immigrants into a new life. Men whose ancestors had been accustomed to the peasant’s tatters or the craftsman’s leather apron could show by a democratic costume that they were as good as, or not very different from, the next man. If, as the Old World proverb went, ‘Clothes make the man,’ the New World’s45 new way of clothing would help make new men.”46
Boorstin chronicles how the very idea of income was reinvented in the New World. “Before the nineteenth century the concept of ‘income’ had very little importance in the Old World; it was used indirectly to measure property ownership or stake-in-the-community or as a basis for election reform.”47 In Europe—and virtually everywhere else—the important metric was property ownership, specifically land, because that was the measure by which the state and the society assigned status.
In America, where nearly everyone was an immigrant or the recent descendant of an immigrant, wealth had become disassociated with inherited status or nobility. “Among mobile Americans, a nation of recent immigrants moving from one place to another up and down the social scale, ‘income’ was a more convenient and more universally applicable standard of measurement than wealth or property. Income was as close as one could come to quantifying the standard of living, and it provided a simple way of telling who was above or below the standard.”48 Even the concept of “standard of living” took on new meaning in America, because that standard was constantly and rapidly improving for nearly everyone.
This explosive growth owed much to plentiful natural resources, especially land. But the indispensable ingredient was, and always has been, people. In this case, a certain kind of individual and specific class of people: the entrepreneur and the bourgeoisie. In Europe, the entrepreneur aroused fear and distrust. Again, innovation had a negative connotation throughout Europe—and much of the world—until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In England and Holland, business innovators, like scientific ones, were more honored than anywhere else in the Old World, but in the New World the inventor became a hero. Likewise, in England and Holland, the middle-class merchant was more respected than anywhere else on the Continent, but in America the whole country was being built around a fundamentally bourgeois worldview. The middle class, and those who strived to be in it, for the first time had a government that reflected their interests and aspirations.
In the Old World, the right to form a legal corporation was entrenched in politics and status. It was a special privilege, akin to being granted a title to land. In America “the corporation was democratized by being made a standardized product, available to anyone who followed the simple steps prescribed and paid a small registration fee.” Now, as Boorstin notes, “instead of businessmen anxiously seeking the special privilege of incorporation, the states competed for the favors of businessmen. The enticements offered by land speculators, city boosters, and railroad promoters to natural persons and their families were matched by enticements to these artificial persons.”49
The old iron triumvirate of class, guild, and throne that made economic advancement an act of rebellion against the status quo had been overthrown.
It is a testament to how largely the legacy of slavery hangs over our thinking today that it is difficult to write any of this without constantly offering the balefully accurate caveat “except for blacks” and, to a lesser extent “except for women.” It is an entirely accurate point. But, as discussed earlier, slavery was a nearly universal human institution across the world and throughout the ages. Against the yardstick of the present—at least in the democratic, liberal West—every advance in human liberty fails to measure up.
My point here is not to justify or diminish the evil of slavery or Jim Crow. It is simply to argue that we should read the chapters in human history in their correct order. The American Revolution, as Barack Obama has argued, unleashed a new argument for new principles that, when carried to their moral and logical conclusion, commanded the end of slavery and Jim Crow. No one can argue that it shouldn’t have happened sooner—or not have been necessary in the first place. But the principles we invoke to condemn the past for its misdeeds are the very principles that the past bequeathed to us.
* * *
—
In the century and a half following the Revolution, America experienced the greatest run-up in material prosperity of any nation in human history. In the four decades from 1860 to 1900, our population more than doubled, from 31 million to 76 million. When Daniel Webster died in 1852, America was a third as wealthy as Great Britain. Five decades later, it had grown fivefold, with America one and a quarter times richer than the British.50 From 1890 to 1910, the U.S. GNP grew at 6 percent a year. According to historian Burton W. Folsom Jr., in 1870 America was creating 23 percent of the world’s industrial goods, while Britain and Germany produced 30 and 13 percent, respectively. By 1900, America was in first place with 30 percent; Britain fell to 20 percent, and Germany rose to 20 percent. In 1870, Britain was the world’s chief steel producer; by 1900, Andrew Carnegie alone made more steel than all of Great Britain.51
In 1775, real GDP per capita was $1,968.24; by 1820, it was $2,173.78. By 1929, it was $11,020.48.52 Life expectancy rose by leaps and bounds. Workweeks became shorter. Diets improved. “In the Old World, beef was the diet of lords and men of wealth. For others it was a holiday prize. But American millions would eat like lords,” writes Daniel Boorstin.53
America defied the Malthusian curse that bedeviled societies for all of human history: Even as its population exploded, it got richer even faster. (I wrote an appendix on human progress so I would not have to clutter up later pages with economic statistics. You can refer to it to get a greater appreciation of the explosion of wealth, prosperity, and health that came with this unprecedented experiment in human affairs.)
But while the Miracle repealed Malthus’s Law of Population, it did not repeal human nature. The natural tendency of man to form coalitions, factions, guilds, and aristocracies manifested itself continually throughout American history. But the combined power of the constitutional order and sheer economic growth tended to keep it at bay. We’ll return to that later.
One last point needs to be made here. The triumph of the Miracle in America isn’t simply a story about economics or law. The economics are important because that is the measurement of human material improvement. It is also the chief metric that many of those who despise and revile capitalism invest with the most moral authority. It must be said again and again: The free market is the greatest anti-poverty program in all of human history. In a very real sense, it is the only anti-poverty program in all of human history. The legal system is important because it provides the guardrails for continuing human improvement.
But focusing on economics gives short shrift to an
other kind of entrepreneurialism that America unleashed upon the world more than any other nation: the entrepreneurialism of the self. The pursuit of happiness is not an inherently or exclusively an economic concept. It is much bigger than that. America’s culture of liberty, its legal doctrines of natural rights, and perhaps most of all its staggering material prosperity made it possible for the masses to define happiness on personal and individual terms, to earn their own success as they defined it. This fact is a double-edged sword, for by removing the idea of external authority like never before and exalting the sovereignty of the personal, we have opened a door for human nature to come rushing back in.
PART III
7
THE ELITES
Aristocrats Unchained
As we’ve seen, the American founders believed that the enemy of liberty was arbitrary power. They rejected a line of thought that stretches from Plato’s Republic through Rousseau’s social contract to any number of modern ideologies that men—the right men, disinterested men—could be trusted with unchecked power.
George Washington was the most admired man in America at the time of the Founding, and the office of the presidency was in many ways molded around the granite edifice of his reputation for honor and good character. And yet the Founders still placed enormous checks on the president’s power because they knew that a George Washington would not always be on the ballot.
In theory, the threat of concentrated power falling into the hands of a few people or a single person—be it an aristocracy, caste, guild, star chamber, priesthood, or even some “elective despotism”—was foreclosed with the ratification of the Constitution. But not all of the Founders were entirely optimistic that the experiment would work. First, they believed the system could work only if the public remained virtuous, for the good character of the people is the best guarantor of fidelity to the law. John Adams worried that the people themselves might, in some populist fervor, seek to overthrow limited government. This would be made even more likely if the people turned away from virtue and, in turn, liberty. As Washington said, “Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.”1
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 19