Читать книгу The Way Back - F. H. Buckley - Страница 14
ОглавлениеThe Invention of the American Dream
NOT ALL OF THE DELEGATES TO THE 1787 PHILADELPHIA Convention were the demigods Jefferson took them to be, and George Mason looked down on some of them with the aristocratic disdain of a Virginia planter.
You may have supposed they were an assemblage of great men. There is nothing less true. From [New England] there were knaves and fools and from the states southward of Virginia they were a parcel of coxcombs and from the middle states office hunters not a few.1
That’s how people from other states have often seemed to Virginians. However, the delegates included sixteen lawyers, four judges, seven politicians, four planters, and two physicians.2 Twenty-nine of them had undergraduate degrees, nine from Princeton, four each from Yale and William and Mary, and three each from Harvard and King’s College (Columbia). Three had attended college in Great Britain, at Oxford, St. Andrews, and Glasgow. Six had been trained as lawyers at the Inns of Court in London.3 Half were on Mrs. John Jay’s dinner invitation list, the Social Register of the time.4 By any standard, most were the aristocrats of America.
Did they know that the document they signed would sound the death knell for their class? Very likely not. They could not have imagined the changes in our politics, let alone the changes in our society, that would transform America.
None of the Framers would have anticipated the social upheavals and political changes that have taken place since their day. They took aim at one kind of aristocracy, a hereditary one, but expected that a different kind of aristocracy would survive, an aristocracy of talent and republican virtue that would survive Madison’s process of filtration and ascend to the highest political offices. What such a “natural aristocracy” would look like was, famously, the subject of a series of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1813. Friends at first during the Revolution, then antagonists in politics, they were at last brought together in retirement through their mutual friend, Benjamin Rush.
The reconciliation delighted Adams, who wrote long, teasing letters to his old friend. For his part, Jefferson wrote serious letters that acknowledged the differences that still separated them, taking up Adams’ hint “that we ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other.” The natural aristocracy, said Jefferson, was one of virtue or talents, and he contrasted this with an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth. The latter, he said, was a “mischievous ingredient in government,” which he trusted would be rejected in popular elections.5 All very well, replied Adams impishly, but “what chance have Talents and Virtue in competition with Wealth and Birth?” Or beauty, he added, no doubt recalling how he had been mocked as ‘His Rotundity.’ “Beauty, Grace, Figure, Attitude, Movement, have in innumerable Instances prevailed over Wealth, Birth, Talents, Virtue and every thing else.”6 Then there was the natural deference paid to eminent families.
Our Winthrops, Winslows, Bradfords, Saltonstalls, Quincys, Chandlers, Leonards, Hutchinsons, Olivers, Sewalls etc are precisely in the Situation of your Randolphs, Carters and Burwells, and Harrisons. Some of them unpopular for the part they took in the late revolution, but all respected for their names and connections and whenever they fall in with the popular Sentiments, are preferred, ceteris paribus to all others.7
Yet suppose, added Adams, that Jefferson’s natural aristocrats overcame all of the prejudices of family names, and the preference for beauty. Suppose that, as Jefferson imagined, voters would prefer genius to birth, virtue to beauty, and that a meritocracy of intelligence and character were chosen to lead the country. Even then, said the skeptical Adams, I would wish to place a check on their ambition. No class of people can safely be given unlimited power over others.
More than Jefferson, the conservative Adams had a better grasp on what the future would hold. Where Jefferson foresaw the popular election of natural aristocrats, Adams understood that voters would be looking for things other than republican virtue in their politicians. And where Jefferson thought that his natural aristocrats would promote the public interest, Adams predicted the rise of modern interest group politics in which everyone looks out for number one. Most of all, Adams expected that a form of hereditary aristocracy would survive, in the country’s leading families.
Adams’ Boston is more democratic today than in his day, or in the recent past. Cleveland Amory’s Proper Bostonians told of a letter of recommendation written a hundred years ago for a scion of the city. “You will be more than satisfied with him. His father was a Cabot, his mother a Lowell, and further back there were Saltonstalls and Peabodys.” From Chicago the prospective employer wrote back “unfortunately we were not contemplating using Mr. ______ for breeding purposes.”8 Even today, however, dynasties may still be found, for who can doubt that family connections matter in a country whose leaders bear names such as Clinton and Bush, and where the Kennedys and Pauls begin with a leg up. We like to think we live in an egalitarian society, but there’s less social mobility than we imagine, and less we can do to change this than we think.
Neither Adams nor Jefferson anticipated how democracy would transform America in the nineteenth century. While both men still lived, states began to depart from the system of filtering presidential candidates by letting state legislators pick the electors. In the 1824 election, only a quarter of the states chose electors in this way, and four years later only two states did so. The 1824 election was also the last one in which the House of Representatives chose the president because no candidate obtained a majority of votes in the Electoral College. The prescient George Mason had predicted the rise of democracy. “Notwithstanding the oppressions & injustice experienced amongst us from democracy; the genius of the people is in favor of it, and the genius of the people must be consulted.”9 But even Mason failed to anticipate just how profoundly America would change over the next 50 years.
American society had indeed begun to change with the Revolution. An early effort to create a hereditary social elite amongst members of the Revolution’s officer class proved to be a major embarrassment for George Washington. After surrendering his sword in 1783, Washington enjoyed the company of his old comrades and allowed himself to be elected the president of their group, the Society of the Cincinnati. The problem, however, was that its members were seen to constitute an American aristocracy. Writing from France, Jefferson warned Washington that a single fiber left of the Society “will produce an hereditary aristocracy which will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.”10 Jefferson’s fears proved unfounded, however. Today the Society’s Washington headquarters, largely unused, may be seen across Massachusetts Avenue from the considerably more popular and meritocratic Cosmos Club, whose walls are graced with the pictures of members who have won Nobel or Pulitzer prizes or Presidential Medals of Freedom, people such as Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell, people not to be found in the club across the street. The Founders’ descendants had returned to the general mass, as George Mason had predicted.
The change was most obvious to foreigners. Before the Revolution, English visitors to colonial America felt very much at home, especially when they came to Virginia. Its people, reported a British officer, were well-bred, polite, and affable.11 By the 1830s, however, American society had radically changed, as a new set of visitors discovered. Now Americans seemed to embrace the world of business with an eagerness that appalled the European. Captain Marryat, the author of popular novels such as Mr. Midshipman Easy, visited America in 1836–37 and observed that “time to an American is everything, and space he attempts to reduce to a mere nothing. . . . ‘Go ahead’ is the real motto of the country.”12 It was democracy that had made the difference, said Alexis de Tocqueville. “In democracies there is nothing greater or more brilliant than commerce; it is what attracts the regard of the public and fills the imagination of the crowd; all energetic passions are directed toward it.”13
Commerce had made ordinary Americans wealthy, but to the European visitor this had seemed a Faustian bargain, where culture and refinement had been traded away for money. The mother of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope lived for several years in the States, and reported that the “polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of” in America.14 Marryat had no better opinion of Americans. “Honours of every description, which stir up the soul of man to noble deeds—worthy incitements, they have none,” he observed.15 All of that had been bartered away in the pursuit of wealth. Politicians were the worst. “No high-minded consistent man will now offer himself” for public office, said Marryat. “The scum is uppermost. . . . The prudent, the enlightened, the wise, and the good, have all retired into the shade, preferring to pass a life of quiet retirement, rather than submit to the insolence and dictation of a mob.”16 Themselves the product of an aristocratic age, the Founders had created a society that had little use for men like themselves.
Not every American celebrated what had happened to their country, and the revolt against the new commercial democracy was nowhere stronger than in the South, especially when slavery was in question. Beginning with John C. Calhoun in 1837, southerners argued that poor northern workers, though free, were nonetheless “wage-slaves” of their employers. The slaveholders’ scorn for northern life came naturally to them, and its roots maybe found in their long-held contempt for trade. One saw it in Washington’s Rule 35 (“Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive”), and in Jefferson’s paean to farmers in his Notes on the State of Virginia. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breast he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”17 Compared to them, thought Jefferson, the mobs of Northern factory workers were “cankers” that subverted laws and society.
By the 1850s, Southern apologists for slavery went further still to defend an aristocratic vision of society that came to be called the mud-sill theory. “Every social structure must have its substratum,” wrote George Fitzhugh.
In free society this substratum, the weak, poor and ignorant, is borne down upon and oppressed with continually increasing weight by all above. We have solved the problem of relieving this substratum from the pressure from above. The slaves are the substratum, and the master’s feelings and interests alike prevent him from bearing down upon and oppressing them.18
The mud-sill is the base of a building, on the bare earth. Above it, by stages, the mansion is erected, to be inhabited by those superior people who are the carriers of civilization.
Domestic slavery in the Southern States has produced the same results in elevating the character of the master that it did in Greece and Rome. He is lofty and independent in his sentiments, generous, affectionate, brave and eloquent; he is superior to the Northerner in every thing but the arts of thrift.19
Fitzhugh had taken aim at every institution of liberal democracy, from the English Revolutionary Settlement of 1689 with its Bill of Rights to the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence. His theory of class struggle resembled that of the Communist Manifesto, which he had read, with the difference that Fitzhugh sided with the upper classes. His attack on the materialism, individualism, and greed of a northern mercantile society is one which today’s Occupy movement might applaud, did they not know where it came from.
Most Southern apologists for slavery were merely racists, sometimes taking their inspiration from biblical texts, sometimes seeking a more up-to-date foundation in what passed for scientific racism. Fitzhugh was a racist, of course, but he was also something more than that. He simply liked slavery, and thought it inevitable. In defending the institution, he foreswore any advantage he might derive from what he saw as racial inferiority. Whites made good slaves too, he thought, and he would not discriminate on the basis of race or color. His was an equal opportunity slavery, and when he spoke of northern wage-slavery he meant real slavery. Nineteenth century industrial society had created a new class of slaves, with the difference that the callous Northern wage-slavery was so much worse than the paternalistic slavery of the South.20
However it reads now, Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South was not an especially radical book in its day. Today we would think Fitzhugh the most extreme of right-wingers, but had not his British contemporary Thomas Carlyle said much the same thing, and used the N-word to do so?21 On what might be taken for the Nineteenth Century British Left, writers such as Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens (with Mrs. Jellaby, his “telescopic philanthropist” in Bleak House) argued that England’s poor merited more concern than African slaves. Fitzhugh had placed himself in the mainstream of a nineteenth century attack from the Left and Right on the egalitarian political ideals of George Mason and Thomas Jefferson. And his attack on social mobility required an answer, which it would receive from a most unusual place.
The farmers who gathered in Milwaukee on September 30, 1859 for the Wisconsin state fair were treated to displays and speeches about modern agricultural improvements. There were presentations on how to make champagne from gooseberries, prizes for the best pig, and a report on that noxious bird, the sapsucker. Some of the visitors might have stopped to listen to a visitor from Illinois, who had recently made a name for himself in a series of debates with Senator Stephen Douglas. Abraham Lincoln had accepted an honorarium of $100 to come to the fair, and one of the organizers, thinking they might as well get their money’s worth, asked him to give a speech. Lincoln joked that he had not a platform to stand on, whereupon someone brought him an empty dry-goods box.22
Finding himself before an agricultural fair, a rising politician could be expected to dwell on the virtues of agrarian life, the honesty, industriousness, and high-mindedness of farmers. That’s certainly what a Jeffersonian Republican would have said. But then Lincoln wasn’t a Jeffersonian Republican. He came to politics as a Whig, and his beau ideal of a statesman was always Henry Clay.23 Lincoln liked “internal improvements” (federal support for infrastructure projects), high tariffs to pay for them, and most of all the idea of social mobility in which everyone is provided with the opportunity to flourish. Besides, he had seen farming life back in Kentucky, and got out of it as quickly as he could. His views on agrarian society could be expressed in three words, says Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo: “I hate farming.”
Lincoln was not unprepared when asked to speak. He had frequently hit the lecture circuit, with talks on discoveries and inventions, and spoke for three-quarters of an hour in a speech that revealed his deepest thoughts on politics and society. What he didn’t do was pander. Farmers, he told the crowd, are wonderful people, but they’re really no better or worse than other people. What was exciting about agriculture was how it had progressed, thanks to scientific experiments and new technology. Steam power, he said, now that’s the ticket! What new technologies do is lighten the burden of physical labor while increasing production, and who could be opposed to that?
No group more needed new technology or could profit more from book-learning than farmers, said Lincoln. There were the new harvesters, which substituted capital improvements for human labor and made farms much more productive. Then there were the new seeds, which might increase a harvest twentyfold. Farming had become an intellectual endeavor, and what made agricultural fairs so valuable was the way in which they spread the news of new discoveries and inventions. So said the only American president who ever held a patent in his name (for a barge that could navigate the shallow rivers of downstate Illinois).
From his talk about labor and technology, Lincoln turned to labor and democracy, and to mud-sills. His law partner, William Herndon, had given him a copy of Sociology of the South and reported that no book had more angered Lincoln.24 And as Lincoln tended to ramble in his talks, the leap from threshers to George Fitzhugh was an easy one. What Lincoln objected to, in the mud-sill theory, was the idea that mental and physical labor were the work of different classes of people.
From that idea so much was to follow. It meant there were no sharp class distinctions between capitalists and laborers, since laborers use their minds and most capitalists labor for their profits. And since everyone uses their minds, education should be open and available to all. Crucially, one’s lot in life should not be fixed, and everyone should be permitted to ascend from the lowest stations in life, as Lincoln had himself had done, rising from the grinding and desperate poverty of a hardscrabble farm. Through his own efforts he had bettered himself, read voraciously, and became a lawyer; and from his personal rise he took an understanding of society that led in time to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery. That by itself would have made Lincoln the greatest leader of his time, but even apart from that, and the Civil War too, Lincoln’s domestic policies would have made him the dominant nineteenth century American president. From his premises about individuals and society, as expressed in Milwaukee and repeated in his July 4, 1861 Address to Congress, came land grant colleges, an open-border system of immigration, and free land for farmers under a Homestead Act that transformed his country. It was how, he told Congress, the fight to preserve the Union should be seen.
This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.
“All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln had written earlier that year.25 Two years later, on his way to his inauguration in Washington, he told a gathering at Independence Hall in Philadelphia that “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”26 Jefferson had introduced an abstract truth about equality, applicable to all men and all times. What Lincoln had done, however, was to give new meaning to the Declaration. First, and most obviously, Lincoln understood that Jefferson’s egalitarianism was incompatible with the institution of slavery. In addition, Lincoln had a different understanding about why equality mattered. More than an abstract truth, it was also a guarantee of social mobility.
This progress by which the poor, honest, industrious, and resolute man raises himself, that he may work on his own account . . . is that progress that human nature is entitled to, is that improvement in condition that is intended to be secured by those institutions under which we live, is the great principle for which this government was really formed.27
Jefferson had spoken of a natural aristocracy in which the most gifted and able might rise to the top, but this was simply a happy by-product of equality. For Lincoln, however, it was more than that. Rather, the central idea of America, as expressed in the Declaration, became through Lincoln the promise of income mobility and a faith in the ability of people to rise to a higher station in life. There was nothing base about labor, as Fitzhugh had thought. Instead, what was ignoble was an aristocratic disdain for work and the failure to attempt to better oneself. That was his idea of what America meant, and his ideal of self-improvement and mobility has come down to us as the American Dream.
That was our dream—but has our dream now fled?
