As developed in previous chapters, Jefferson was correct to view the Anglo-Saxon tendencies toward individualism and representative government as ethnic traits. This view was emphatically stated in this previously quoted passage from the mid-nineteenth century by Whig historian Thomas Macaulay emphasizing the special characteristics of the “German race”:
The Reformation had been a national as well as a moral revolt. It had been not only an insurrection of the laity against the clergy, but also an insurrection of all the branches of the great German race against an alien domination. It is a most significant circumstance, that no large society of which the tongue is not Teutonic has ever turned Protestant, and that, wherever a language derived from that of ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day prevails.[619]
Ernest Tuveson comments: “This notion had begun as early as the seventeenth century. The Germanic peoples in general, it came to be assumed, had throughout their history exhibited qualities of courage, intelligence, and love of liberty that peculiarly fitted them to be the defenders of the ‘Christian liberty’ promised in the New Testament, and to advance the cause of religion and civilization.”[620]
A critical feature of individualism is that group boundaries are relatively permeable, and assimilation is the norm. As Kaufmann notes, even in the nineteenth century, individualism resulted in assimilation rather than maintaining impermeable boundaries with other European groups: “Interethnic relations followed a pattern of Anglo-conformity. … Immigrants were to be made into American WASPs by absorbing American English, American Liberty, and American Protestantism and, ultimately, by intermarrying with Americans.”[621]
For example, in the late eighteenth century, the response to large-scale German settlements in Pennsylvania was to reject German-American separatism and a multicultural model of America. Attempts to make German an official language and have laws written in German were rebuffed. German-Americans began Anglicizing their names to better fit into the American milieu.
There was an assumption, even among many liberals, that these ethnic others would look and act like Anglo-Americans. In the nineteenth century, liberals typically had “an optimistic, expansionist Anglo-conformism that accepted the immigrants, provided they looked like Anglo-Protestants and assimilated to the WASP mytho-symbolic corpus.”[622]
This optimistic ideology was fueled by deeply muddled thinking about race. Nineteenth-century American intellectuals tended to have what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “double consciousness”—a tendency to think of America as committed to a non-racial liberal cosmopolitanism as well as a tendency to identify strongly with their Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. This fits with individualism because the ethnic tendency is to assimilate others rather than to erect strong ethnic boundaries. However, the result was an intellectual cul-de-sac in which intellectuals were forced into attempts to reconcile identification with Anglo-Saxon ethnicity with statements of universalism.
Emerson himself was an example of double consciousness. He wrote that America was “the asylum of all nations. … The energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes, of the Africans and Polynesians, will construct a new race … as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages.” This very clear statement of universalism co-existed with the following statement from around the same time: “It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. … The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance.”[623]
These ideas are not contradictory—the idea that there are differences between the races is compatible with the idea that eventually the races will look and act like good Anglo-Saxons. In his book English Traits, Emerson acknowledges racial differences: “Race is a controlling influence in the Jew who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance.”[624] However, he maintains that racial boundaries are weak and that “the best nations are those the most widely related; and navigation, as effecting a worldwide mixture, is the most potent advancer of nations.”[625]
What is odd is Emerson’s belief that the English race could remain the English race even after absorbing other races. Emerson thought that immigrants to America would literally be assimilated to the English race: The “foreign element [in America], however considerable, is rapidly assimilated,” resulting in a population of “English descent and language” (my emphasis).[626] This is an example of the muddled thinking on race that was characteristic of many intellectuals during the nineteenth century.
The basic problem was that these thinkers were Lamarckians—that is, they believed that people could inherit traits that their ancestors had acquired during their lifetimes. With Jean-Baptiste Lamarck rather than Darwin as inspiration, race and culture were conflated. Liberal intellectuals thought that Blacks would become White with more education, like “the running of a dirty stream into a pellucid lake which eventually clears leaving no trace of mud.”[627]
Lamarck’s theory has always been a darling of the left because it holds the promise that inherited traits can easily be changed simply by changing the environment. It is no accident that Lamarckism became official ideology in the Soviet Union precisely because it implied that it would be quite easy to mold the new Soviet man—or, as Trofim Lysenko, the director of the Institute of Genetics of the USSR thought, to develop crops that could flourish in cold climates.
In the hands of the Anglo-Saxon assimilationists, Lamarckism was part of the optimistic spirit of elite nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals who envisioned a future America to be people just like themselves, no matter what their origins.
Self-interest and Liberal Ideology
An ethnic tendency toward individualism makes people less likely to erect barriers to other groups. But individualists are certainly capable of developing a sense of ethnic identity. In fact, we have seen that it was quite common for Anglo-Saxons to think of individualism as resulting from their ethnic heritage. However, individualists are relatively less ethnocentric, and as a result it is relatively easy for other motivations to predominate. These motivations can range from libertarian self-actualization to self-interested business practices that, for example, promote non-White immigration if there are economic benefits to self whatever their effects on other groups in the society or the society as a whole.
Kaufmann points to a general tendency—still apparent today—in which elite Protestants made alliances with immigrant groups (including non-White immigrants such as Chinese on the West Coast in the 1870s) to encourage immigration. These elites were in opposition to the middle- and working-class Anglo-Protestants of both parties and their blue-blood, Darwin-influenced intellectual defenders based on the East Coast.[628] “To quell dissent within their party, Republican elites accused their populist wing of racism and ethnic bigotry”[629]—a trend that remains quite common today.
As is also the case today, people with the most liberal attitudes were not personally threatened by upholding liberal attitudes (e.g., favoring Chinese immigration in areas where there were no Chinese). Or liberals imagined that “divine providence … would keep Chinese numbers in the United States to a minimum.”[630] Again, there is quite a bit of muddlement: prominent Republicans like William Seward (Secretary of State, 1861–1869), simultaneously “backed equal rights for blacks and favored Chinese immigration, [but also] fervently believed in the separation of the races and in the homogeneity of the nation.”[631]
Other Liberal Nineteenth-Century Intellectual
Currents
Eric Kaufmann points to four different liberal intellectual traditions, all of which had their origin in the nineteenth century and are still present today.[632] Each of them may be seen as a different expression of individualism. None were majority views and
none were decisive for creating the watershed countercultural revolution of the 1960s. But all point to a robust tendency in the direction of deracinated cosmopolitanism in the thinking of secular and religious intellectual elites of a New England Puritan background. And because these movements were staffed by people in positions of authority and cultural influence, they likely provided a climate that was receptive to or at least unwilling to vigorously oppose the more radical movements that came to the fore with the rise of a new elite—movements that ultimately proved the downfall of the Puritan legacy in America. Essentially they had paved the way for their own displacement.
Libertarian Anarchism
One strain of New England liberalism is represented by the libertarian anarchists, typified by Benjamin Tucker, a believer in unfettered individualism and opposed to prohibitions on non-invasive behavior (“free love”, etc.). But even these libertarians were conscious that their attitudes sprang from their ethnic heritage: “The radical tradition [of anarchic individualism] did not necessarily point in a cosmopolitan direction, but, as with radical figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Horace Greeley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, often reinforced ethnonational pride. … Anarchist logic did not wipe clear all traces of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant attachment.”[633]
A large part of the vision of what Kaufmann calls the “expressive pathfinders” in the early twentieth century was a rebellion against small-town Protestant America, its sexual repression and its other mores which resulted in exclusion of some (e.g., homosexuals). It was a radical individualism freed from the social controls championed by the Puritan tradition. Indeed, as indicated above, Puritanism should be seen as having inherent tensions between individualism and powerful social controls—rules governing everything from church attendance to sexual behavior. When individual Puritan-descended individuals left these tightly controlled groups, they were free to develop radically individualist ideas in the manner of Benjamin Tucker.
Centered in New York, this expressive individualist avant-garde culture was not significant in the nineteenth century, being overshadowed by the genteel radicalism emanating from the New England transcendentalist tradition. The new Bohemians in Greenwich Village (ca. 1910–1917) were led by Max Eastman (1883–1969) and defined themselves by cultural liberation, which they understood as freedom from constraints. It was an early precursor of 1960s’ hippiedom, celebrating self-discovery, emotion over logic, intuition, rebellion, free love, Black jazz, and leftist politics. They developed an ingroup ideology that functioned like a pseudo-ethnic identity in which shared attitudes served as boundary markers. They had founding myths, iconic figures, and a utopian vision of an expressive, egalitarian future.
In short, it was a moral community of shared values and outlook of the kind so typical of Western groups (as opposed to shared ethnicity or kinship-based identity). Another important figure in this mold was H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) who opposed Puritanism as “moralistic, aesthetically barren and an impediment to American intellectual development.”[634]
Many were in open rebellion against the Christian, small-town culture they had grown up in. Rebels like Hutchins Hapgood were attracted to Jews because they were the “other”: “I was led to spend much time in poor resorts of Yiddish New York, through motives neither philanthropic nor sociological, but simply by virtue of the charm I felt in men and things there.” Horace Kallen, the Jewish philosopher of cultural pluralism (and someone who retained his own ethnic commitments[635]) commented in 1915 on the effects of the individualism of American intellectuals of the period:
The older America, whose voice and spirit were New England, has … gone beyond recall. Americans of British stock still are prevailingly the artists and thinkers of the land, but they work, each for himself, without common vision or ideals. They have no ethos, any more. The older tradition has passed from a life into a memory.[636]
Expressive individualism remained a marginal phenomenon until it became an integral part of the counterculture of the 1960s. At that point, it became ingrained in American mass culture as a component of the culture of the left.
Parenthetically, there were really two streams of the 1960s counterculture of the left, a hippie version of expressive individualism and a politically radical version. These two strands interacted and overlapped but also had important differences—the hippies less politically involved and more involved in artistic expression and experimenting with drugs, while radicals often condemned the lack of political involvement of the hippies. Radicals were not flower children.[637]
The movement of expressive individualism to the center of American culture therefore followed rather than preceded the major cultural changes brought about by the success of the New York Intellectuals and other Jewish-dominated intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique as these came to dominate intellectual discourse after World War II and especially in the 1960s and thereafter.[638] The success of expressive individualism, therefore, was not the cause the eclipse of Anglo-America, but rather a consequence of the rise of a new intellectual elite which promoted it as part of the new culture of the left.
Finally, the fact that some Puritan-descended people promoted expressive individualism is likely best explained by proposing that their inherent individualism was free to express itself after the decline of the strong social controls of Puritanism as a tightly controlled group strategy. It’s said that forging individualists into a cohesive group is like herding cats. Doing so requires strong controls at the group level and an ideology that rationalizes the controls—exactly what traditional Puritanism provided.
Liberal Protestantism
Kaufmann notes several strains of liberal Protestantism in nineteenth-century thought. The Free Religious Association (FRA; founded in 1867) was a more liberal offshoot of the Unitarians—the most liberal strain of American religion and itself a religious offshoot of Puritanism. But again, the members of the FRA thought of their liberal attitudes as stemming from their ethnic heritage. After stating that his religious movement intended to humanize (not Christianize) the entire world, Francis E. Abbot, founder of the FRA, stated “The rest I need comes no longer from spiritual servitude, but must be sought and found in the manly exercise of freedom. It is to those who feel this Anglo-Saxon instinct of liberty stirring in their hearts that my words are addressed—not to those who feel no galling pressure from the easy yoke.”[639]
Merrill Gates (1848–1922), President of Rutgers College and a Congregationalist preacher, also combined his religious commitments with a belief that his political attitudes stemmed from his ethnic heritage: “There is no other ‘manifest destiny’ for any man [than Liberty]. … To this we [liberals] are committed, by all the logic of two thousand years of Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon history, since Arminius … made a stand for liberty against the legions of Rome.”[640]
Many nineteenth-century Protestants believed that all Americans would eventually voluntarily become Protestants. Religious leaders, particularly Methodists and Baptists, rejected the idea of writing Christianity into the U.S. Constitution, but they retained the belief that the U.S. government was Christian. “Anglo Protestants wanted their tradition to be supreme, but their universalist liberal commitments would not countenance boundary-defining measures of legislative origin.”[641] Christianity would retain its special place by persuasion, not coercion.
Parenthetically, the liberal cosmopolitanism of the late twentieth century has taken the opposite strategy: Once it achieved power, it developed strong overtones of coercion, including attempts to limit freedom of speech and remove people from their jobs for beliefs and attitudes that conflict with the cosmopolitan zeitgeist—an indication that liberal cosmopolitanism of the late twentieth century is far more in the Puritan tradition of combining individualist tendencies with strong social controls than with anything approaching libertarian anarchism.
Moreover, even though they did not approve of Catholicism, Protestant religious leaders in the 1840s did not o
ppose Catholic immigration, believing that they could convert immigrants to “the ‘American’ faith”[642] and absorb them into the Anglo-Saxon race. Indeed, all races would immigrate to America for the new millennium: In the words of a prominent Baptist, “In the gathering of all nations and races upon our shores, do we not witness the providential preparation for a second Pentecost that shall usher in the millennial glory?”[643] All races would be absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon race, their better qualities absorbed, “yet [the Anglo-Saxon race] remaining essentially unchanged.”[644]
This is a good example of the optimism so common among American intellectuals in the nineteenth century. It is also an extreme form of egocentrism. What the good minister is saying is that all peoples will eventually assimilate in race and religion to look and behave pretty much like he does. Even in the seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell had a purely religious, very Puritan perspective on tolerance: “he favored freedom of conscience for the godly—'Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists and all’—as a route to eventual truth, unity and the Millennium.”[645] Millenarianism is nothing if not optimistic.
The period from 1900–1910 also saw the beginnings of a liberal Protestant elite willing to sacrifice the dream of conversion for universalist, humanitarian ethics. The idea that Anglo-Saxons would convert the world to Protestant Christianity—common in the late nineteenth century—faded after 1910. This elite was more open to religious relativism and criticized the implicit Whiteness of Christian missionaries. The Federal Council of Churches (FCC; established in 1908) became a key organizing body for liberal Protestantism. In 1924, at the time when the U.S. Congress was overwhelmingly passing an immigration restriction bill favoring immigration from Northwestern Europe, the FCC resolved that
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition Page 23