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Introduction: The American Creed

Any book of history is, consciously or not, an interpretation in which selected data from the past is tossed into the present according to the interest of the historian. That interest, no matter how much the historian’s mind dwells on the past, is always a present one. My own interest in writing this short history of the United States in the twenty-five years following World War II is to explore two questions, in the hope that the reader will be stimulated to take a more active part in the making of an American history different from what we have had so far.

First, why did the United States, exactly as it became the most heavily armed and wealthiest society in the world, run into so much trouble with its own people? From the late fifties to the early seventies, the nation experienced unprecedented black rebellion, student demonstrations, antiwar agitation, civil disobedience, prison uprisings, and a widespread feeling that American civilization was faltering, or even in decay.

And second, what are the possibilities, the visions, the beginnings, of fresh directions for this country?

I begin the discussion of the first question in my opening chapter, with Hiroshima, in 1945, when an entire city was annihilated by American technology in a burst of righteous brutality, with no protest from the American public. I raise the second question in my final chapter with the scene at Bunker Hill, 1971, when veterans of the Vietnam War assembled to protest similar brutality in Indochina.

Running through these questions, and this book, is the theme of an American creed at odds with itself. The common distinctions made between promise and performance, theory and practice, words and deeds, do not represent the situation accurately. The promise itself is ambiguous, the words contradictory. And so with the performance—in which greed and violence are mixed with just enough nobility and heroism to confuse any simple characterization of “America.” For America is not only warrior-presidents, insatiable industrialists, servile intellectuals, and compliant victims, it is also men and women of courage, organizers and agitators of dissent and resistance.

In the pages to follow, I distinguish between the warring elements of the American creed. There is the rhetorical creed, represented best by the words of the Declaration of Independence: “all Men are created equal … unalienable Rights … Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness … whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. …” There is the working creed, those beliefs that, whether or not written into the Constitution and the laws, are embedded in the minds of the American people by constant practice, reinforced by church, family, school, official pronouncements, and the agents of mass communication: that all men are created equal, except foreigners with whom we are at war, blacks who have not been singled out for special attention, Indians who will not submit, inmates of prisons, members of the armed forces, and anyone without money; that what are most alienable are the lives of men sent off to war and the liberties of people helpless against authority; that whenever members of any group of people become destructive of this working creed, it is the right of the government to alter or abolish them by persecution or imprisonment.

In this sense, American history is a long attempt, so far unsuccessful, to overcome the ambiguity in the American creed, to fulfill the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Ambiguity has always been useful to those who run societies. It joins a working set of rules and beliefs necessary to keep the system going with a set of ideals that promise something better in the future and soften the harshness of the present. In the great liberal revolutions of modern times—England in the seventeenth century, the United States and France in the eighteenth century—this ambiguity became more necessary than ever before. Large numbers of people had to be mobilized to overthrow the old regimes and to participate actively in the complex economic and parliamentary-party systems born of those revolutions. The ideals spurred the people; the rules controlled them. Religion, education, the mass media took turns in communicating both the ideals and the rules.

The industrial states that emerged from these revolutions have all claimed to represent great progress over pre-modern societies. The claim is enormously exaggerated. Elections and parliamentary systems have not done away with the concentration of decisionmaking power in the hands of the few; they have permitted only token participation in government by a largely uninformed and powerless electorate. The capitalist system has not done away with the crass division of society into rich and poor that obtained in feudal times; indeed, it has deepened that division on a global scale, and within the rich nations it has disguised the maldistribution of wealth by an intricate set of contractual relationships enforced by law. Modern constitutional due process and bills of rights have not changed the basic truths of pre-modern societies: that justice in the courts and freedom of expression are rarely available to those without money or position. Mass literacy, science, and education have not eliminated deception of the many by the few; rather, they have made it possible for duplicity to be more widespread.

The rise of national states in modern times has been viewed as a progressive development, as an advance over the splintered world of monarchs and popes, tribal chiefs and feudal lords. But the new order, disappointing for most people within the new nations, was lethal for those outside; nation-states were able to organize empires, dispense violence, and conduct war on a level far beyond the reach of the old regimes. The “rule of law” that developed inside the modern nations was accompanied by the rule of lawlessness on the world scene. Nation-states armed with nuclear warheads diverted national wealth to war and preparation for war, while controlling their people at home by police rule and token benefits.

This is not to deny the reality of progress in medical science and technology, in literacy, and political participation. But these prerequisites for a good society have thus far been perverted by war, nationalistic ambitions, and private profit. What is called progress has meant mostly the sharpening of tools not yet used for human purposes, the sowing of expectations not yet realized.

The United States, as the most modern of modern countries, epitomizes all these characteristics of the twentieth-century nation-state. It has been the most effective in utilizing its rhetorical creed, in conjunction with its working creed, to sustain control over its own people and to extend control over other parts of the world.

In America, the use of ambiguity has been most successful. One reason is that the distance between the rhetoric and the rules has been constantly blurred by symbols of change and reform. To the grand claims of progress wrought by modern revolutions, the United States has added the assertion of progress within its own constitutional system. It has passed civil-rights laws for blacks and welfare laws for the poor; it has widened the suffrage and reformed its political structure; it has extended the rights of the accused and voted economic aid for foreign peoples. All these symbols of change and reform have kept alive the notion that progress is attainable within the rules of the American system—by voting for the right men, passing new statutes, getting new Supreme Court decisions, and accepting the system of corporate profit.

The American system has allowed enough change to ease discontent, but not enough to change the fundamental allocation of power and wealth. That which can be termed progress has taken place within the narrow boundaries of an economic system based on profit-motivated capitalism, a political system based on the paternalism of representative government, a foreign policy based on economic and military aggressiveness, and a social system based on a culture of prejudices concerning race, national origin, sex, age, and wealth.

So far, the major political conflicts in the United States have stayed within these boundaries. The American Revolution itself, while winning independence from a foreign ruling group, substituted the rule of a native group of slave owners, merchants, lawyers, and politicians; the new Constitution legitimized the substitution and created a larger arena for the elites of race and class that already dominated the colonies. With the Civil War, the nation outlawed slavery, while maintaining a general climate of racial subordination. Farm and labor movements succeeded in achieving reforms, but mostly for privileged minorities within their constituencies, and inside a larger framework of corporate control of the nation’s wealth. The political fluctuations, even the violent clashes represented by the farm and labor upheavals, had the look but not the reality of a choice between radically different alternatives.

All that I have said here supports the “consensus” interpretation of American history, which states, I believe, a profound truth about our society, that its great “progress” and its political clashes have kept within severe limits. What is missing in the consensus analysis is the persistent strain of protest that shows up repeatedly in American history and should not be ignored—the voices, the ideas, the struggles of those who defy the American working creed, who will not let the nation forget the rhetorical promises, who keep alive the vision, the possibility of a society beyond capitalism, beyond nationalism, beyond the hierarchies that are preserved in a man-eat-man culture. The existence of this strain justifies the work of the “conflict” school of American history, which insists that Americans not forget the black abolitionists, the Wobblies, the Socialists, the anarchists, that we keep in mind Tom Paine, John Brown, Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Malcolm X.

In the postwar years, these two strains, consensus and conflict, became most pronounced; the gap between the rhetoric of the American creed and its working rules became most obvious. The traditional successes of the American system, in crusades abroad and reforms at home, were at their greatest in World War II and in the years that followed. But so was the realization of failure. For the first time, the symbols of achievement and progress began to look false to growing numbers of Americans.

The Second World War, after a quarter of a century, is not as glorious as it once seemed. The war revealed the American system of liberal capitalism at its best: enormously efficient in technology, abundant in jobs and money, united in struggle against a reprehensible enemy, pulsating with noble declarations and marvelous intentions for the nation and the world. But the war also revealed that, at its best, the system’s declarations against the brutality of the enemy were accompanied by mass slaughter—Dresden and Hiroshima; that at its best the crusade against fascism covered up our own racism-—segregation in the armed forces; that at its best America’s generosity toward its allies masked nationalist expansion: we aided the British while replacing them as the oil men of the Middle East. At its best, the economy was built on profiteering through war contracts, and the political system was built on conformity: those outside the political pale—Trotskyists and pacifists—were put in prison, and those outside the racial pale—Japanese-Americans—were put in concentration camps.

An atmosphere thick with the righteousness of combat against Hitler concealed these ironies from everyone except a few cynics and rebels, so tainted by the majority as to make them untrustworthy. Thus, Americans entered the postwar era with great confidence in their system, and with quadrupled power and wealth to back up that confidence.

Not until the sixties did this confidence begin to break down, as crisis after crisis—in race relations, in the distribution of resources, in foreign policy—indicated that something was terribly wrong. The Great Depression had been overcome, fascism defeated, the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism subdued, but within the nation a malaise grew. The troubles of American society could no longer be attributed to departures from the liberal creed—to youthful imperialism or southern racism or corporate exploitation or political witch-hunts. The nation had passed its youth, defeated the Confederacy, replaced the robber barons with the welfare state, and reaffirmed the Bill of Rights by enlightened Supreme Court decisions. We had saved the liberal creed from its external enemies, cleansed it of its interior impurities, and yet infections grew.

Was it possible (and what could be more frightening than this thought? yet the outbursts of blacks, the inexplicable resistance of Asian peasants, the revulsion of former admirers all over the world, the sudden anger of our children, made us think wild thoughts) that the liberal creed itself was faulty? That is, the working creed, not the rhetorical visions of the Declaration of Independence and the pledge of allegiance. Was it possible that the ideas, the values, the symbols, the priorities of American life were wrong? Was it possible that Americans had scraped away certain repugnant layers of their past—the crude imperialism of the Spanish-American War, the lynchings of blacks, the shooting of strikers, only to find that what was left was still ugly?

The turmoil of the sixties planted the suspicion that by the early seventies was stronger than ever: that the most cherished beliefs of liberal democratic capitalism were working to produce those very evils that Americans had always attributed to momentary departures from the liberal creed. The suspicion grew that transgressions on human rights in the United States were not occasional eccentricities; they occurred when we were on dead center; they were normal. The nation’s difficulties did not stem from violations of the working creed of American liberalism but from compliance with it.

It is the faith in this working creed that has now begun to waver—faith in achieving racial equality through constitutional amendments, statutes, and Supreme Court decisions; faith in the system of corporate profit as modified by trade unions and the welfare state; faith in due process, the Bill of Rights, the courts, and the jury system as the means of securing justice and freedom of expression for every American; faith in voting, representative government, and the two-party system as the best way in which to guarantee democracy; faith in police to keep peace at home and protect the rights of all, and in soldiers and bombs to keep law and order abroad; faith in what is perhaps the crucial element in the modern system, in the idea that a paternalistic government will take care of its citizens without their day-to-day exercise of judgment or criticism or resistance.

This book intends to show how this faith has been mistaken, how, in the twenty-five years since World War II, the working creed of the American system has produced a crisis of culture and politics. But it also intends to show that out of this crisis has come at least the beginning of an attempt to act out what was promised, two centuries ago, in the Declaration of Independence.

We start from that enthusiastic moment of victory, when the war ended, to see if there were clues even then, as the nation stood at its summit, to why it began its long fall from grace. Or to see if, indeed, the great war itself—the best of wars—was part of that fall.