America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  I have observed our politics as practiced in village and city wards, in county, in state, and in nation; and it is just as crazy and just as venal as I have suggested. How does it happen, then, that what emerges is a government more stable, more responsible, more permanent, trustworthy, and respected than any other in the world? It is another of our paradoxes. In this we are lucky—watched over by a kindly and humorous deity—or there is something inherent in our system which protects us from ourselves. Our large, rich slice of the earth has survived even our efforts to strip it bare. History treated us kindly in the days of our national infancy; predatory countries, which might have wiped us out, had other business while we were learning the lessons of nationhood. In fact, we find our history strewn with good fortune. Our nation was designed by a group of men ahead of their time and in some ways ahead of ours. They conceived a system capable of renewing itself to meet changing conditions, an instrument at once flexible and firm. We constantly rediscover the excellence of the architecture of our government. It has been proof not only against foreign attack but against our own stupidities, which are sometimes more dangerous.

  In reviewing our blessings we must pay heed to our leadership. It is said of us that we demand second-rate candidates and first-rate Presidents. Not all our Presidents have been great, but when the need has been great we have found men of greatness. We have not always appreciated them; usually we have denounced and belabored them living, and only honored them dead. Strangely, it is our mediocre Presidents we honor during their lives.

  The relationship of Americans to their President is a matter of amazement to foreigners. Of course we respect the office and admire the man who can fill it, but at the same time we inherently fear and suspect power. We are proud of the President, and we blame him for things he did not do. We are related to the President in a close and almost family sense; we inspect his every move and mood with suspicion. We insist that the President be cautious in speech, guarded in action, immaculate in his public and private life; and in spite of these imposed pressures we are avidly curious about the man hidden behind the formal public image we have created. We have made a tough but unwritten code of conduct for him, and the slightest deviation brings forth a torrent of accusation and abuse.

  The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment—social, political, or ethical—can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.

  To all the other rewards of this greatest office in the gift of the people, we add that of assassination. Attempts have been made on the lives of many of our Presidents; four have been murdered. It would be comparatively easy to protect the lives of our Presidents against attacks by foreigners; it is next to impossible to shield them from the Americans. And then the sadness—the terrible sense of family loss. It is said that when Lincoln died African drums carried the news to the center of the Dark Continent that a savior had been murdered. In our lifetime two events on being mentioned will bring out the vivid memory of what everyone present was doing when he or she heard the news; those two events are Pearl Harbor and the death of John F. Kennedy. I do not know anyone who does not feel a little guilty that out of our soil the warped thing grew that could kill him.

  It is said that the Presidency of the United States is the most powerful office in the world. What is not said or even generally understood is that the power of the chief executive is hard to achieve, balky to manage, and incredibly difficult to exercise. It is not raw, corrosive power, nor can it be used willfully. Many new Presidents, attempting to exert executive power, have felt it slip from their fingers and have faced a rebellious Congress and an adamant civil service, a respectfully half-obedient military, a suspicious Supreme Court, a derisive press, and a sullen electorate. It is apparent that the President must have exact and sensitive knowledge not only of his own office but of all the other branches of government if his program is to progress at all. The power of the President is great if he can use it; but it is a moral power, a power activated by persuasion and discussion, by the manipulation of the alignments of many small but aggressive groups, each one weak in itself but protected in combination against usurpation of its rights by the executive; and even if the national government should swing into line behind Presidential exercise of power, there remain the rights, prejudices, and customs of states, counties, and townships, management of private production, labor unions, churches, professional organizations of doctors, lawyers, the guilds and leagues and organizations. All these can give a President trouble; and if, reacting even to the suspicion of overuse or misuse of power, they stand together, a President finds himself hamstrung, straitjacketed, and helpless.

  Americans are quite conscious that there are jagged holes in our system. Wishing to move, to meet new conditions and attitudes, we are nevertheless reluctant to change existing and traditional law. What has been written on paper long enough is written in our hearts, and it is very difficult to remove such lesions. Such a maze of connection and confusion is our curious trap of states’ rights as opposed to federal rights.

  When the Constitution was written, there were thirteen separate commonwealths which not only had their own economic, social, religious, and geographic identities, but—because of distances, lack of communication, roads, and so forth—necessarily maintained their separate polities. The original states could not have conceived of appealing for federal aid in education, health, harbor control, disaster, roads, rail and communications control and subsidy. It is true that some of the states formed loose alliances, such as those in New England and the South; but they remained thirteen individual, more or less self-sustaining small nations.

  Survival has changed that condition, but the greatest change came when, during the deep Depression, the federal government assumed responsibility for the health and well-being of all citizens. This was a true second revolution. Today states’ rights are, to a large extent, anachronisms. Though the Constitution says clearly that all powers not specifically reserved to the federal government are to remain with the states, in matters of interstate commerce, health, education, banking, communications, agriculture, and many other fields the government has had increasingly to assume control, because the states are incapable of doing so.

  On the other hand, civil rights and universal suffrage are specifically mentioned in three constitutional amendments, backed by the Civil Rights Act of Congress, as being unquestionably the responsibility of the federal government, which is clearly charged with carrying out the law and with the punishment of anyone who disobeys it. And here we find one of America’s most notable paradoxes. Those groups and individuals, official and private, whose purpose it is to reject the civil-rights laws and by appeal to states’ rights to nullify federal law cry out like banshees against the injustice of federal regulation. Either crimes of violence, in such cases, are ignored or, if the criminals are brought to trial—this happens very rarely—they are acquitted. The federal government cannot enforce a law when the methods of subversion are beyond its reach. Court orders and contempt proceedings have little force in the face of unpunished violence. The government’s only recourse, the employment of troops to control civil commotion, is a means that has never failed to do more harm than good. Now a government which is unable to enforce its own law soon ceases to be a government. The force of Negro pressure, backed by a majority of white Americans, will not allow us to retire civil rights to the limbo in which the constitutional amendments hid their heads for a hundred years. The only alternative is a federal law making
any crime committed for the purpose of denying or inhibiting civil rights a federal offense, subject to federal judges and federal juries, with the option of change of venue if the local authorities flout the law. The very great threat of such a law might possibly be effective in causing the states to take over their own salvation. The changes of the last twenty years have been enormous, but we have come finally to the entrenched core of rebellion, which must be removed before we can travel on into a livable future. No good society can grow if its roots are in sterile soil.

  Created Equal

  TODAY WE BELIEVE that slavery is a crime and a sin, as well as being economically unsound under our system. Further, we can believe that it has always been a crime and always a sin, although ignored in some earlier periods. Nothing could be farther from the truth; our present attitude toward slavery came into our thinking less than two hundred years ago. We consider slavery a denial of the dignity of man; but human dignity has never been taller or more treasured than in Greece during the Golden Age, when the only Athenians who did not have slaves were those who were too poor to own them and consequently were due to become slaves themselves. From the beginning of known history the great empires grew, conquered, built their lasting monuments, and carved their immortality entirely through the use of slaves. And when the twin continents of North and South America were opened to the world, there was no question but that slave labor would be used to prepare and comb and gentle their intractable land with its hostile climates. The indigenous peoples were used as much as possible in Latin America, but there was always a difficulty in using Indians as slaves: it was their country and they knew it; with their neighbors and their tribe mates, they were susceptible to revolts and to self-defense. The opening of Africa to the slave trade solved the problem; the black men and women and children were rounded up, dragged to the coast, chained in their hundreds in kennels between the decks, and transported—those who survived—to the new land. In the process they lost not only their nativity but their identity, their names, their families, and any possible future.

  As the concentration of slaves grew greater in those parts of America where the use of them was practical, one of the impractical manifestations became apparent. The Spartans, who were outnumbered by their Helots, were always in danger from revolt; in the American South the problems of control became apparent just as soon as the numbers of Negroes made them capable of any kind of resistance. There is no way to keep a man from resenting slavery; the best a slave-owning community can do is to make resistance seem hopeless. One way of doing this is to brainwash the slave from childhood with the conviction that he is inferior, stupid, weak, and irresponsible. A second method is to catch resistance in the bud and to punish it mercilessly; a third, to break up families and friends so that no possible tribal association can gather or establish itself; and fourth, and perhaps most important, to keep education, with its inevitable questioning and communication, from the slaves at all costs. All these methods were used, and still there were slave revolts, some of them of very serious proportions.

  Students of brainwashing agree that it does not reach deeply into consciousness and that its effects disappear unless the pressure is maintained. The slave owner who by work, attitude, and action constantly maintained “I am not afraid of you Negroes because you are inferior, spiritually and mentally, to me” was like a man shouting that he is not afraid of the dark, unaware that he would not mention it if he were not afraid. In the South this fear of the Negro went deeper and deeper into the white population, and was kept deep by constant reiteration of their inferiority. But it is one of the paradoxes of slavery that, by its very nature, the slave becomes stronger than his master. He is there to do the hard, the strenuous, the dangerous, and the unpleasant work instead of the master. Furthermore, a slave soon loses his value as property if he is crippled, weak, or sick; not only is he useless to his master, he is valueless for resale. The Negroes captured in Africa and transported under appalling conditions to the coast caused considerable losses to the traders, for the weak died, the savage killed themselves or were killed in reprisals or in attempts to escape, the spiritually weak died of pure heartbreak and hopelessness. Then they were subjected to the many diseases of new climates and countries, and only those Negroes who developed immunities survived. Then, those who were not clever enough to conceal their feelings and to bide their time were destroyed; and finally, a diet of coarse, natural foods in small quantities and a diet low in sugars and fats did for them what any doctor counsels for his weak and flabby patients. Meanwhile a complete lack of medical care sent the slaves to herbs and soothing teas as well as to the powerful and psychiatric safety of religion. Lastly, being always in the presence of an active and overwhelmingly armed enemy gave the Negroes a community of spirit and a reliance on one another which whites have only vaguely felt in wartime when they have been under siege.

  In the antebellum South, it was generally known that the Negroes were, by and large, physically strong and virile, and that, as with most physically strong people, they were sexually potent and active. This made for one more stage in the tower of fear; it was generally considered that Negroes were just that way—strong and sexy—and the fact that this strong, resistant breed had been developed by selection never occurred to the Southern whites.

  It was not kindness or ethics or delicacy of feeling that kept slavery out of the Northern states in the nineteenth century; it was economics. There were some slaves in the cities and on the large farm holdings, and many of the ships that brought their dreadful cargoes of misery from the Gold Coast to the slave blocks of the South were owned, captained, and navigated by New Englanders. But the small farms of New England, poor and rocky and tiny, would not support slaves. It is easy to be uncompromisingly against an evil one does not need and cannot enjoy or profit by. But how did the Yankee abolitionists come by the idea that slavery was evil? Perhaps the Puritan strain so deeply set by the Pilgrim Fathers in the souls of their descendants could not tolerate the idea of warm climates and lush crops and the storied ease, the comfort and luxury of the great plantations of the South. The Pilgrims had hated such things in the Church and the crown in England, and they distrusted it in America; and if slavery was the foundation of such a way of life, slavery was evil, even sinful. It followed that slaves must be innocent and good. In the South many slave owners were beginning to doubt the value of the institution, and a number of the more intelligent landowners were beginning slowly to get rid of their slaves, either by sale or by emancipation. Then the power of Northern disapproval struck the South. All slave owners were evil, brutal men. Well, they weren’t, and they knew they weren’t. So it came about that the Southerners had to defend slavery in order to defend themselves.

  By this time the question of slavery in the popular mind was no longer a matter for reason and analysis; it had become purely emotional. The American, Northern or Southern, before the war walked a jiggling tightrope. Consider, for example, my own great-grandfather. He was a Yankee from Leominster, Massachusetts, and his name was Dickson (when his family had come to Leominster in the middle of the seventeenth century it was spelled Dixon). He was a man of large family and even larger ideas. About 1840, he picked up his wife and children, put them in a sailing ship, and departed for the Holy Land. He was a farmer and a Christian; his purpose was to convert the Jews to Christianity, but he had devised a method Jesus had not thought of: he intended to teach the Jews agriculture. Once he had his toe in the door he would gradually move Christianity in on them. It was a fairly pragmatic piece of reasoning. If the first part worked, his clients, the Jews, would be open to the second step.

  Israel was at that time a Turkish province; agriculture, even the most enlightened kind of 1840 agriculture, requires labor. There was only one kind of labor—slaves. And Mr. Dickson was a convinced and unchangeable antislavery man. You can almost feel his clever, practical, honest Yankee mind studying the problem, perhaps as he had studied the checkerboard in a Leominster general st
ore. He worked it out, too. He did not buy slaves; he made life contracts for some men to work his farm, the laborers signing the contract themselves, proving their free will—though of course their owners got the money. It absolved my great-grandfather from the sin of slave owning. If his people ran away, he could have them apprehended by the Turkish police, not for escaping but for breach of contract.

  Antebellum American Negroes, if they could have known their double image, would have been very confused. To the Yankee, informed by sermons, pictures, prejudice, travelers’ tales, and novels, the Negro was a mistreated, brutalized, overworked, and starved creature, sometimes a hero, sometimes a saint, but never, by any chance, a man like other men. To the Southerner, informed by his fears, his prejudices, and the necessity for maintaining discipline, the Negro was a lazy, stupid animal, who was also dangerous, clever, tricky, thievish, and lecherous.

  We know very little about what the Negroes thought of their masters.

  They shared their thoughts and feelings only with one another and communicated with their masters with a studied, practical politeness. I do not mean to say there were no loyalties or loves or kindnesses between white and black. There were, but not of the texture of the feeling for their own kind, and this withdrawn separateness, driven deep into the generations, still exists. A friend of mine, a Southerner, said recently, “I can never talk to a Negro. I want to, but I just don’t know what to talk about to him.”