PART III
America, the Unfinished Project
Of all the nations of the world, few confront a greater challenge in facing up to the imperatives of the Great Turning than the United States of America. Few nations have been accustomed for so long to living so far beyond their means. Few labor under the burden of greater inequality or a greater gap between their idealized self-image and their troubled historical reality. We can achieve the mature democracy that is a defining condition of Earth Community only by acknowledging that, like the democracy of ancient Athens, ours is a partial and immature democracy.
We think of ourselves as a nation of problem solvers. To solve a problem, however, we must first acknowledge it. To this end, the following chapters take an unflinching look at the realities and implications of our national imperial legacy, the imperfections of our democracy, our reckless relationship with the natural environment, and the real and inspiring struggles for justice of people of color, women, and working people, to whom justice has long been denied.
Democracy is neither a gift nor a license; it is a possibility realized through practice grounded in a deep commitment to truth and an acceptance of the responsibility to seek justice for all.
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CHAPTER 9
Inauspicious Beginning
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such Principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, March 1789
The history of the United States of America underscores the harsh reality that a declaration of liberty and a new constitution promising tranquility, liberty, and prosperity for all do not suddenly wipe away the cultural and institutional legacy of five thousand years of Empire. In the case of the United States, this legacy includes extremes of plutocracy, theocracy, genocide, slavery, racism, and sexism. This truth is crucial to understanding current U.S. politics and the challenge the Great Turning presents to the nation that has long prided itself on being the world’s beacon of liberty.
We easily forget just how inauspicious the prospects for the foundation of a democratic nation were on July 4, 1776, when the representatives of 160thirteen English colonies in North America issued their declaration of independence from the most powerful nation of their day. Those of sober mind might well have concluded the rebels had taken leave of their senses. General Washington’s ragtag part-time army of volunteers stood against a much larger British force of disciplined professional soldiers. British loyalists controlled most of the institutions of government, and as much as a third of the population was composed of royalists who remained loyal to the English king and the institutions of hereditary rule. As to the prospects for securing the rights of all men even if they were able to outlast the British army, the social condition of the colonies could hardly have been further from Aristotle’s ideal of a “single homogeneous, organized solidary body of citizens capable of totally unified action.”
In the first centuries following Europe’s discovery of the New World, Europe’s ruling class had approached it as an alien land of interest only for what it might yield in slaves, gold, and other forms of natural wealth to support their power and comfort. Kings looked to it as a source of tax revenue, and investors as a source of profit. Later kings would come to see it as a dumping ground for their human refuse to reduce crime and ease revolutionary pressures for the redistribution of wealth and power at home.
At the time of the American Revolution, the ranks of the colonists who aligned with the revolutionary cause included pretentious slave-owning aristocrats, abolitionists, impoverished backwoods farmers, rebellious militiamen, privateers, smugglers, swindlers, former slaves and bonded laborers, profiteering merchants, Enlightenment thinkers, and religious theocrats of a mind to flog, imprison, or hang all who did not share their particular faith. Most of those involved had little if any education, knew only conditions of extreme servitude and hardship, and felt no sense of national identity until well after the Revolutionary War was under way. The motives of those who joined the rebellion were as diverse as their circumstances.
Furthermore, the assertion in the Declaration of Independence, inspired by the Enlightenment philosophers and drafted in a moment of revolutionary fervor, that all men are created equal and that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, defied the evidence of five thousand years of history. It also defied the reality of the genocide, slavery, profiteering, and religious bigotry that were defining features of the North American colonial experience. The idea of creating a democratic nation with equal rights for all had no place in 161the thoughts of the economic plutocrats and religious theocrats who founded the early settlements. Recognition of these early circumstances is essential to any understanding of how far we have come as a nation and how much we have left to do to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.
PLUTOCRACY
Foreshadowing the corporate rule of our own day, the colonial settlements were created more as economic than political jurisdictions— essentially company estates established by corporate charters issued by the Crown to be managed for the profit of their owners. Beginning in 1584, with the permission of Elizabeth I, Walter Raleigh made several unsuccessful attempts to establish the first English colony in America as a private investment on Roanoke Island off the North Carolina coast.1 Private entrepreneurs and joint stock companies established a dozen permanent English colonies on other sites along the coast of America during the reigns of James I (1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49).
The technology of the time limited communication to letters or word of mouth via small sailing ships, which meant that administration and finance were necessarily in the hands of the individuals who held the charters, with virtually no governmental oversight. A few impoverished settlements struggling for subsistence survival were of little interest to a home government happy to leave their management as semifeudal principalities to their owners. Within the limits of their circumstances, the early settlements generally replicated Europe’s well-defined social stratification. Over time, most settlements developed governing bodies composed of their wealthiest white male property owners.
In the early years, the isolation of the colonies from one another was even greater than their isolation from England. The settlers in the colonies did not begin to think of themselves as belonging to a land with its own distinctive character, destiny, and interests until the eighteenth century.
THEOCRACY
As was characteristic of the countries from which they came, secular and religious authority were closely linked, as evident in the early legal codes of the individual colonies. The official charter that established the 162first colony in Virginia in 1609 stated that one purpose of the colony was to convert the “people in those Parts unto the true Worship of God and Christian Religion,” as practiced by the Anglican Church of England. Anglicanism was also the officially mandated state religion in Maryland and the Carolinas.
The theocratic nature of colonial governance is revealed in the types of crimes assigned the death penalty in The General Laws and Liberties of New Hampshi
re, published in 1680: these included worshipping any God but the Lord God, taking the name of God in vain, witchcraft, sexual intercourse with an animal, sodomy, and cursing or rebelling against one’s parents. Doing unnecessary work or travel on the Lord’s day was punishable by fine and whipping. The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts (1647), the Capitall Lawes of Connecticut (1642), and the Articles, Laws, and Orders, Divine, Politic, and Martial for the Colony in Virginia (1610– 11) had similar provisions. In Virginia the death penalty applied as well for false witness and for thrice failing to properly observe the Sabbath.2
Because the southern colonies worshipped the Anglican God and the northern colonies worshipped the Calvinist God, the religious practice legally required in one colony on pain of death was a heresy punishable by death in another. This not only restricted freedom to practice one’s chosen faith but also hampered relationships among the colonies. The Puritan Calvinists were particularly clear in their theocratic designs.
A Special Righteousness
The Puritans, dissenters from the Anglican faith, came to North America in search of the freedom to establish a theocracy based on the teachings of John Calvin, which meant using the authority of government to deny others the same religious freedom they had come to American to gain for themselves.3 Church membership was voluntary, but everyone, whether a member or not, was bound by law to attend Sabbath worship and contribute to the support of the clergy.4
John Winthrop, a pious, tough-minded Puritan lawyer and landed gentleman, sailed from England in 1630 to serve as the first governor of the newly chartered Massachusetts Bay Company. On that voyage, Winthrop declared to his fellow passengers that it was their mission to fulfill a biblical prophecy to create the New Jerusalem, the millennial kingdom, the righteous city on a hill of God’s chosen people.5 Puritans 163settled Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. When they arrived, they established Congregational churches throughout these northern colonies, made Calvinism their officially mandated faith, and banned the practice of any other.6
The influential Puritan preacher John Cotton preached without equivocation that theocratic rule, not democracy, was the will of God.
Democracy I do not conceyve that ever God did ordeyne as a fitt government eyther for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearely approoved, and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the soveraigntie to himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the best forme of government in the commonwealth, as well as in the church.7
The Calvinists defined religious liberty as freedom from the heresies of Anglicanism, Catholicism, and all other deviant faiths. The only religious freedom they granted dissenters from Calvinism was the liberty to choose between silence, voluntary exile, banishment, or execution should they insist on returning.
Mary Dyer was an outspoken Quaker preacher who was twice forced into exile from Massachusetts with the warning that if she returned a third time she would be executed. She returned and became one of four Quakers hanged by Massachusetts between 1659 and 1661 for refusing to stop preaching their faith.8
The early New England colonies were divided into parishes, each of which had one church that served as the center of civic life and administration. All competing religious influences were suppressed, and no outside preacher could cross the border into the parish without permission. The early town meetings for which New England has been noted were essentially meetings of the congregation in the parish church.
Although each considered the other to be heretics, Calvinists and Anglicans shared a belief that the moral order of society depended on religious uniformity and a single religiously defined moral standard enforced by the civil administration. Both reckoned that religious freedom was both wrongheaded and a threat to the public order. Eighty-five percent of the nearly half million early settlers lived in colonies in which either the Church of England or the Congregational Church had officially 164sanctioned religious monopolies. Both groups took a dim view of the Quakers who settled in Pennsylvania and other central states, for whom religious pluralism was a basic tenet of their faith.
This is the historical background of the provision for a strict separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution. The purpose is to preclude use of the secular power of the state to enforce the beliefs of a particular faith. It would otherwise have been impossible to establish the Union.
God Loves Plutocrats
It is with good reason that German sociologist and economist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, noted a natural affinity between Calvinism and capitalism. Rarely has any religious doctrine aligned more perfectly with the cause of plutocracy, capitalism, and Empire. It not only served to lend moral legitimacy to the concentration of financial wealth and the subservience of lesser mortals to men of wealth and power, it as well lent capitalism a motive force.
The teachings of Calvinism emphasize the depravity of the human condition and maintain that, because of his sinful nature, man can have no role in his own salvation, which is granted to God’s chosen purely as a miracle of divine grace. Embracing a belief in predestination, Calvinism teaches that God settled the question of individual salvation or damnation at the beginning of time. Consequently, the individual is powerless to influence his circumstances in the afterlife through good works in this. Nor can he know until death his true condition.
According to Calvinism, a predisposition to righteous behavior is evidence that one may be among the chosen. Hard work, righteous living, and material prosperity provide no guarantee that one is saved, but they are taken to be favorable signs. Wealth and power are the surest signs that one is among the saved, because it is self-evident that those who are blessed with wealth and power are among God’s chosen since he has clearly favored them. Deference is therefore their natural due.
By contrast, poverty, drunkenness, a propensity to question authority, and other vices are signs that one is out of favor with God and was probably condemned to hell from the beginning of time. By this line of reasoning, the poor are not victims of a failed economic system; they are the damned, the instruments of the devil, and no fate is too harsh for them.
Calvinist belief in human depravity affirms the underlying dehumanizing premise of neoliberal economics that humans are by nature 165capable only of selfish acts. This belief, combined with the belief in the superior righteousness of those blessed with wealth and power, provides a foundation for an easy alliance between contemporary religious theocrats and contemporary corporate plutocrats. The theocrats affirm the moral righteousness of the plutocrats, and the plutocrats provide media and funding support for politicians committed to the theocrats’ restrictive social agenda.
GENOCIDE
When Christopher Columbus landed on a Caribbean island to “discover” America in 1492, a generous Native people greeted him warmly with food, water, and other gifts. It was their first encounter with Empire. Columbus wrote in his log:
They… brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.… They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.… They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.… They would make fine servants.… With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.… They are so naïve and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.… As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts.9
Similar reports of the generosity and egalitarianism of the Natives of North Americ
a from early European visitors and settlers were commonplace.10 Columbus responded by taking what gold he could find, killing those Natives who displeased him, and abducting others as specimens of the slaves he later promised to deliver to the Spanish crown in return for further support. 166
It is instructive in light of the discussion of pre-Empire civilizations in chapter 5 that in this initial encounter between the “civilized” men of Europe and the “savages” of the pre-imperial tribes of the New World, the latter thought first of sharing their abundance. The former thought only of subjugating and enslaving the innocents and confiscating their gold by force of arms.
According to the historian Howard Zinn, Columbus arrived in a world that in places “was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world.”11 In many tribes, the systems of governance were more democratic than any encountered in the five-thousand-year experience of the empires that historians equate with civilization. There is evidence that America’s founders drew on the lessons of the Native experience in the design of the new nation’s democratic institutions.12
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