But could Chavez’s success be replicated in the ghetto? Chavez, after all, confronted, in the valleys of California, conditions just as terrible as those in the slums of the cities, but he had nevertheless succeeded, against every expectation, in inspiring his people to act, in giving them a sense that there was more to life than the misery their broken bodies had long since learned to accept. Could one apply the lessons of Delano to the human problem at the heart of the ghetto? Like the migrant workers before Chavez, the children of the cities exhibited all the signs of people who had never been given any sense of their value, their potential, their unique human worth. “A lot of those looters are just kids in trouble,” Bobby said at the time of the riots in Watts. “I got in trouble when I was that age.”34 The apathy, the dejection, the sullenness that characterized so many of these men and women resulted in an atrophy of nerve, a paralysis of will, a listlessness that the unsympathetic outsider was likely to confuse with laziness or stupidity. A bureaucratized system of handouts could only perpetuate the problem, could only humiliate those whom it was intended to help:
In our generosity [Bobby declared] we have created a system of hand-outs, a second-rate set of social services which damages and demeans its recipients, and destroys any semblance of human dignity that they have managed to retain through their adversity.… In the long run, welfare payments solve nothing, for the giver or the recipients; free Americans deserve the chance to be fully self-supporting.35
So far from improving the self-esteem of the individual, the welfare state undermined it even more. Impersonal, sterile, and gray, the welfare bureaus reinforced in those who had become dependent upon them their already marked sense of powerlessness and hopelessness, and contributed to the “sense of helplessness and futility” that overwhelmed so many of those who were in the grip of its power.36 The welfare bureaucracy did nothing to instill in its beneficiaries those feelings of self-confidence and self-respect that might have made it possible for them to seize the initiative and take control of their lives.37 The welfare state “destroy[ed] self-respect,” it “lower[ed] incentive,” and it led to “lifelong dependency.”38 The time had come to reform it.
10
The problem of the underconfident soul is a relatively new one in human history. It seems not to have existed, on a large scale, before the eighteenth century. Men and women who, had they lived a few centuries earlier, would have occupied a definite place in life—however dismal that place might have been—found themselves, in the modern age, forced to make their own way in the world, a world that was bigger, more complicated, and more impersonal than it had been in the past. To succeed in finding places for themselves in the modern world, men and women needed to possess far greater reserves of self-confidence than was the case in the past.
In the past self-confidence had been a problem of the few and not the many; it was a problem only for those who were supposed to make something of themselves in the world. Machiavelli’s prince, for example, needed self-confidence, for only a highly self-confident man could succeed in conquering Fortune.1 Princes needed to possess self-confidence; much of the rest of the world did not. And yet Machiavelli’s slender handbook for princes is itself an indication of how rapidly the world was changing; the very fact that a commoner like Machiavelli should have been so intrigued by the connection between self-confidence and success, the very fact that he should have been so fascinated by the impact the self-confident man (Cesare Borgia, for example) can have on history, is an indication that the problem of self-confidence had come, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, to have a wider significance than ever before. Self-confidence was no longer a problem for princes and generals alone, a problem for those who by tradition were supposed to possess what Machiavelli calls virtù (strength, self-confidence, audacity); self-confidence was—or was becoming—a problem for everyone, from civil servants like Machiavelli to strongmen like Borgia himself. Sainte-Beuve informs us that, in seventeenth-century France, it was thought exceedingly “strange” that La Rochefoucauld should have been “so embarrassed in public that if he had to speak on official matters before six or seven persons his courage failed him.”2 That a French nobleman should have been as unself-confident as La Rochefoucauld was thought unpleasantly queer; at the same time, none of his contemporaries would have been in the least surprised to learn that La Rochefoucauld’s valet de chambre was equally incapable of expressing himself confidently in a crowd. “Why ever should a valet need to express himself confidently in a crowd?” they would have wondered. Today, however, everyone is expected to be able to act confidently in a crowd, to make something of himself in the world, and thus the problem of self-confidence has become, for the first time in history, a mass problem.
Some natures, of course, adjusted quite readily to the changed conditions of the modern world; others did not. The intellectual-priest type was one victim of the new age; there was less need of such a type in the demystified world that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment brought into being. The decline of the intellectual-priest was not, perhaps, a great loss: intellectual-priests never accounted for more than a small percentage of society, and those few who are still to be found today have by and large found a decent refuge, not indeed in the Church, but in the university. Other groups, however, present a more serious problem. There are in every American city young men and women who lack the resources, intellectual or material, to carve out satisfactory places for themselves in the world. One sees them hanging out on streetcorners and in shopping malls, idle, bored, cynical, a refutation in themselves of the faith of the philosophes, a testament to the naïveté of the Enlightened belief that progress in the arts and sciences would inevitably work a fundamental change in human character. We know less about their fears and anxieties than we do about those of the priestly intellectuals and the neurasthenic “sick” souls of the upper and upper-middle classes, whose depressions and eating disorders are the object of so much scrupulous study. But this much we do know: the neurasthenic “sick” soul of the upper and upper-middle classes and the “depraved” or “fallen” soul of the lower and lower-middle classes are alike in being unself-confident souls.
That underconfident souls should constitute so large a proportion of our population is troubling. But are those who occupy the other end of the confidence spectrum any less a matter for concern? Are our society’s supremely self-confident men and women any less disturbing? Do we care—should we care—whether they are admirable figures? Have they anything at all to do with the humane and liberal traditions of the West? Or are they merely the possessors of certain narrow technical competence, magicians with money, possessed of an uncanny ability to manipulate capital or technological know-how? For there can be little doubt that, if the Machiavellian prince was the archetypically self-confident figure of four or five centuries ago, today it is the modern entrepreneurial hero who, more than any one else, embodies the idea of self-confident action in the world. But should our underconfident youth really want to be like the entrepreneurial hero? Should they really want to be like Rockefeller, or Gates, or Gatsby, or Reginald Lewis, or Joseph Kennedy? The great-souled men of the past, the supermen whom Machiavelli and Nietzsche and Stendhal celebrated in their writings, the godlike beings whom Aristotle described in the Politics, had their shortcomings, to be sure. But does the modern entrepreneurial hero—the hero whom we are taught today to admire and envy—really represent an improvement on the heroic idea? Did Morgan, Rockefeller, and Ford advance beyond the point that Alexander, Borgia, and Bonaparte reached? Caesar might have been a bad man, as Cato said, but still he was undeniably a great man; he set the standard against which we continue to judge great men. When admirers of Jack Kennedy celebrated their hero’s coolness under pressure, his heroism in battle, his literary achievements, his attractiveness to women, they invoked an ideal that is recognizably Caesarian in its derivation: Caesar, the brilliant warrior, the master of literary form, the seducer of women, the charmer of Catullus. In The Makin
g of the President 1960, Teddy White very explicitly compared Jack Kennedy with Julius Caesar.3 When, however, we come to the modern entrepreneurial hero—when we come to Gatsby—we are disappointed to find him a duller creature than either Caesar or Kennedy. Here is Gatsby on his (make-believe) youthful adventures:
After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe—Paris, Venice, Rome—collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.… Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.4
Gatsby is unlikely to have charmed Catullus. Caesar’s tale of the youthful adventure in which he was captured by Mediterranean pirates is not only far more winning than Gatsby’s (Caesar’s story reads like a chapter of Candide), it has the additional merit of being true. The very phrases Gatsby uses are “so worn and threadbare,” Nick Carraway says, that they evoke “no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust out of every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.”5 Gatsby is not a great-souled man of the type beloved of Stendhal and Nietzsche and Machiavelli; he is a curious mixture of disciplined Puritan (he drinks little and boasts that it took him only three years of disciplined work to “earn” the money he used to buy his house) and eighteenth-century rogue charmer, a cross between Benjamin Franklin and Lovelace, the anti-hero of Richardson’s Clarissa, a man with a winning smile who is handy with accounts, a seducer of women who can read an income statement. His dreams of glory are sadly, oppressively, overwhelmingly pedestrian. His heart, we are told,
was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.6
It is possible, of course, that Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, the Middle Western patrician whose family claims to be descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, has distorted the qualities of Gatsby’s plebeian imagination; Carraway admits that Gatsby is the embodiment of everything for which he has an “unaffected scorn.” And yet the fact remains that the modern entrepreneurial hero is not a particularly interesting character; by the standards of Old World greatness he is not a great man at all. The East Egg patricians who, like Theodore Roosevelt, attempted to revive those standards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could not help but despise the new breed of entrepreneurial West Egg heroes who, like Gatsby and Joseph Kennedy himself, fell so far short of their lofty, great-souled ideal.
If the entrepreneurial hero is not an intellectually or spiritually compelling figure, he nonetheless tells us a good deal more about the requirements for success in the modern world than Caesar and Alexander or even Teddy Roosevelt do. Ordinary men and women might not need the superabundant self-confidence of a Jay Gatsby or a Joseph Kennedy to get by in the world that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment brought into being, but even modest success in our complicated system of political economy requires a degree of the confidence that the tycoons possessed. The Stimsonians, however, turned away from the problem of self-confidence. Their programs did nothing to strengthen self-confidence in those who were without it. Their public policies, like those of the kings and emperors of the Old World, were conceived in almost exclusively heroic and monumental terms; one finds in those policies little sympathy for the aspirations of the individual men and women they were supposed to benefit. Robert Moses’s public architecture, a public architecture conceived with little understanding of the soil in which it was planted, is a perfect example of the Stimsonians’ attraction to the grandiose and the monumental, a perfect example of their indifference to the individual. Moses, the prodigy of Yale and Oxford, succeeded in creating a public architecture that Haussmann and Napoleon III might have envied. Like Caesar Augustus, who said that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, Moses, too, fundamentally altered the character of his city. He found New York a city of neighborhoods and elevated trains and left it a city of reinforced concrete and elevated highways.
The vast bureaucratic structure of the welfare state is a no less telling monument to the Stimsonians’ love of the grandiose at the expense of the individual. Emblematic of the Stimsonian approach were the great housing projects the bureaucrats built, monuments to Enlightened intentions gone awry, behemoths conceived without any conception of human proportion or scale. Looming hideously over the nation’s decaying ghettos, the projects had been built, Bobby said, without “relevance” to the “underlying problems” of “alienation” that had caused many people to “need assistance in the first place.”7 They had become places of “despair and danger.”8 In conceiving these and other bureaucratic programs, the architects of the welfare state had “ignore[d] the shaping traditions of American life and politics.”9 Having no relation at all to the individuals they were intended to serve, the welfare bureaucracies did nothing to endow those individuals with a feeling of confidence in themselves.
Emerson, Lincoln, and the Idea of “Self-Trust”
IN QUESTIONING THE ability of government agencies and government programs to solve the human problem at the heart of the ghetto, Bobby did more than rebel against his own Stimsonian heritage, he drew inspiration from a much older liberal tradition, the liberal individualism of Emerson and Lincoln.
Emerson and Lincoln were perhaps his two greatest American heroes.10 Emerson was his favorite American poet; Jack Newfield remembered him reading Emerson’s poem “Fame” aloud one evening in his New York apartment.11 And Bobby was a careful student of Emerson’s Essays.12 His admiration for Lincoln was, if anything, even greater. Bobby purchased, at considerable expense, a rare copy of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation; an acquaintance who toured Lincoln’s house in Springfield, Illinois, with him in 1956 remembered how “deeply moved” Bobby had been by the experience.13 After the burial of his brother in the cemetery at Arlington on November 25, 1963, Bobby, riding back to the White House with his widowed sister-in-law, ordered the driver to take them to the Lincoln Memorial, where they paused in silence to gaze up at the Daniel Chester French statue of the sixteenth President.14
Bobby’s devotion to the greatest of America’s propounders of the power of the free unfettered individual was not merely fortuitous, he believed as passionately as they in the promise of the individual. Bobby derived from his study of Emerson’s philosophy and Lincoln’s life not only an admiration for the ideal of the self-reliant individual, but also an insight into the central obstacle to the creation of a nation of self-reliant individuals: the absence in large numbers of men and women of self-confidence, or what Emerson in his Essays calls “self-trust.”15
The Emersonian influence on Bobby’s evolving thought is important enough to make a closer examination of the Essays themselves desirable. A great part of the first series of essays is devoted to the problem of self-trust. In self-trust, Emerson says, all the other virtues are comprehended.16 Emerson attempted, in such essays as “Self-Reliance,” “Heroism,” and “History,” both to understand the ways in which ordinary men and women—the “cowed” and the “trustless”—develop self-confidence and at the same time to instill a degree of this confidence in the ordinary men and women who were his readers.17 The Essays have some claim to being the first, as they have certainly a claim to being the greatest, of American self-help books. (The term “self-help” was itself first used by Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle in his book Sartor Resartus). A man “takes up Emerson tired and apathetic,” John Jay Chapman wrote, and “presently finds himself growing heady and truculent, strengthened in his most inward vitality, surprised to find himself again master in his own house.”18 The Essays are the literary equivalent of Prozac; they admonish the reader to put aside his timidity and his reticence, his fear and his embarrassment, his tendency to bow d
own before great names and august personages; they urge him to “believe” his own thoughts, to “trust” himself, and to be unashamed of the “divine idea” that he represents.19 If we develop a faith in ourselves, Emerson tells us, we will succeed in banishing “discontent,” which he said is only another name for “the want of self-reliance” and self-confidence.20 Bobby himself was moved by such Emersonian celebrations of self-confidence as this one, which he underscored in his copy of the Essays: “When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself to the world.”21 Bobby praised Allard Lowenstein, the liberal activist whose confidence in himself and his principles helped ignite the Bust Johnson movement in 1968, in similarly Emersonian terms:
For Al, who knew the lessons of Emerson and taught it [sic] to the rest of us: “They do not yet see and thousands of young men as hopeful, now crowding to the barriers of their careers, do not yet see that if a single man plant himself on his convictions and then abide, the huge world will come round to him.” From his friend Bob Kennedy.22
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