Читать книгу The American Kaleidoscope - Lawrence H. Fuchs - Страница 12

Part One

THE CIVIC CULTURE AND VOLUNTARY PLURALISM

The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and previleges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.

—GEORGE WASHINGTON

They came here—the exile and the stranger, … they made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish.

—LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

Ethnic diversity a nation does not make, and separatist movements are a source of tension in many multiethnic nations: Sikhs in India, Basques in Spain, Tibetans in China, Albanians in Yugoslavia, Shiites in Lebanon, Estonians in the Soviet Union, the French in Canada, and others. In an effort to achieve stability in such societies, arrangements sometimes are made to divide up power, a president for this group, a prime minister for that, so many seats here and there in a process that used to be called verzuiling (columnization or pillarization) in The Netherlands, where until recent decades the Dutch divided leadership positions between Catholics and Protestants.

Lebanon, where top positions usually were explicitly divided between Muslims and Christians in the decades following the Second World War, is the most notorious example of the failure of verzuiling to achieve stability. In adjacent Israel, which has special schools for Arab children and seats for Arabs in the Knesset (parliament), the Israelis desperately seek ethnic peace. In other multiethnic, multilingual societies, the interests of language groups are balanced, as in Belgium, which has official language regions with linguistic borders, and Switzerland and Canada, with comparable arrangements. In other multiethnic states, nationality regions are recognized (China has so-called “autonomous regions” and the Soviet Union has a Council of Nationalities), although without necessarily yielding significant power to minorities.¹

Arrangements to share power, whether symbolic or real, describe various systems of pluralism, ways of drawing boundaries between members of one group and another. Each pluralistic system answers the questions: What kind of boundaries? Toward what goals? Enforced by whom? Whatever the formal power-sharing arrangements, one group usually dominates the others in pluralistic societies, as in Cypress, where Greeks dominated Turks for a long time, or in Turkey, where Turks still oppress Armenians, or in Japan, where Koreans born in that country are regarded officially as foreigners.

Groups often are kept apart by tightly drawn boundaries. Turkish children born in Germany are not thought of as Germans, the children of Italian workers born in Switzerland are not regarded as Swiss, the children of Ghanaians in Nigeria are Ghanaians still. Insiders usually scorn outsiders, as the Chinese Han people have done, calling them yemanren (wild people who do not reason), or the Ethiopians, who label Jews in their midst by the pejorative term falashas (strangers). Even when insiders do not disparage outsiders they rarely trust them, as in the case of southern Italians, who often are warned in childhood to be wary of the forestiere (foreigner or stranger) or the straniero (alien) only a village distant from themselves.

The feeling of “we-ness” that insiders share usually is based on similar physical characteristics, language, and religion. When those characteristics are combined with the memory of a shared historical experience (on Passover all Jews recite “when we were slaves in Egypt”) and founding myths (God told Abraham to create a new nation), the ties that bind—the cement of nationhood—are particularly strong. Such founding myths, accounting for the origins of a nation and explaining its destiny, usually are tribal (based on genealogy or blood), as with the Abraham story, or the tale of Theseus, the mythical Athenian king who defeated the horrible Minotaur of Crete and united twelve small independent states of Attica, making Athens the capital of the new state. The foundation of Rome was attributed to Romulus, son of Mars, the god of war, who, after having been raised with his brother Remus by a she-wolf, conquered the Sabines and built a new city on the Tiber River on the spot where their lives had been saved. Japan, according to its traditional founding myth, was established because a favorite descendant of the Sun Goddess created the Japanese islands and became the first emperor, from whom all other emperors are descended.

Early in its history, spokesmen for the new American nation explained that the U.S. was created by God as an asylum in which liberty, opportunity, and reward for achievement would prosper. This powerful new myth provided an ideological rationalization for the selfish interest Americans had in recruiting European immigrants to claim the land, fight Indians, and later to work in the mines and factories. It became the founding myth of a new political culture, uniting white Americans from different religious and national backgrounds. Belief in the myth motivated Americans to create new political institutions and practices, which Alexis de Tocqueville saw as the basis of American patriotism in the 1830s.

When Tocqueville asked what made the Americans a nation, he answered that American patriotism was not based on ancient customs and traditions as in other countries. Patriotism in the U.S., he wrote, “grows by the exercise of civil rights.” What he called the “patriotism of a republic” was based on the premise that it is possible to interest men (and women) in the welfare of their country by making them participants in its government, and by so doing to enlist their enthusiastic loyalty to the national community. He asked, “How does it happen that in the United States, where the inhabitants have only recently immigrated to the land which they now occupy … where, in short, the instinctive love of country can scarcely exist; how does it happen that everyone takes as zealous an interest in the affairs of his township, his county, and the whole state as if they were his own? It is because everyone, in his sphere, takes an active part in the government of society.”²

To this theme Tocqueville returns again and again; it is the core of his interpretation of American civilization. Immigrants and their children claimed the U.S. for their own and became attached to it through the exercise of civil rights. The freedom of Americans to worship, speak, assemble, and petition their government, and their protection under equal laws (for whites only) bound them in a national community even though their political interests often were diverse. Tocqueville maintained that Americans combined in political and civic associations to effect remedies to problems that in aristocratic or monarchical societies they would have to endure. In lobbying for remedies, they learned the arts of working with others. They formed coalitions, made compromises, and extended their connections and knowledge beyond the small circle of relatives and friends with whom they ordinarily dealt. The capacity of Americans to form associations in order to achieve some public good constantly amazed him. Given political freedom, Americans saw the possibility of changing their own lives for the better by altering some public condition. Self-interest and patriotism went hand in hand.

Tocqueville wrote that political life made the love and practice of association more general. It appeared to teach men and women to work together with those “who otherwise would have always lived apart.”³ Instead of dividing groups from each other, politics in the U.S. appeared to have the paradoxical effect of breaking down barriers and rendering Americans more loyal to the national community. He described political associations as “large free schools, where all the members of the community go to learn the general theory of associations.”⁴ In their political associations, he wrote, Americans “converse, they listen to one another” and work together in all sorts of undertakings. “Thus it is by the enjoyment of a dangerous freedom that the Americans learn the art of rendering the dangers of freedom less formidable.”⁵ Freedom of association in political matters, he concluded, at least where rights were extensively practiced, “is not so dangerous to public tranquility as is supposed.” Indeed, “it may strengthen the state in the end.”⁶ The only threat to the state that Tocqueville foresaw would be caused by the inequality of blacks, who, in contrast with white immigrants, were generally excluded from the exercise of civil rights.⁷

Other Europeans saw the American political system—none of them called it a culture, let alone a civic culture—as the most distinctive feature of American life and the one that made Americans a nation. John Stuart Mill, who was influenced by Tocqueville’s great work (he reviewed it in 1835 and 1840), saw that by encouraging the practice of civic responsibility, Americans, as vestrymen, jurymen, and electors, lifted their ideas and feelings out of a narrow circle. Mill wrote of Tocqueville that he showed how the American was “made to feel that besides the interests which separate him from his fellow citizens, he has interests which connect him with them; that not only the common weal is his weal but that it partly depends upon his exertion.”⁸ In his classic work On Representative Government, Mill observed, “for political life is indeed in America a most valuable school.”⁹ Almost all European travelers to the United States, he noted, observed that every American is in some sense a patriot. Paraphrasing Tocqueville without acknowledging him in this instance, he continued, “it is from political discussion and collective political action that one whose daily occupations concentrate his interests in a small circle round himself, learns to feel for and with his fellow citizens, and becomes consciously a member of a great community.”

Like Tocqueville, Mill pointed out that when some are excluded from the exercise of civil rights they will become either permanent malcontents “or will feel as one whom the general affairs of society do not concern.”¹⁰ Without mentioning American slaves, he pointed out that everyone is degraded in an otherwise free society when some persons are not permitted to participate in its deliberations.

Americans were united not just by the political principles of the republic or even the exercise of civil rights, but also by the symbols and rituals that gave emotional significance to their patriotism: speeches about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; celebrations on the Fourth of July; the naming of towns, counties, and cities and the writing of songs to honor the apostles of the American myth (Washington, Jefferson, and later Lincoln). Much later, Americans would add ritual incantations (the Pledge of Allegiance, “God Bless America,” “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “The Star-Spangled Banner”).

Americans were members of a political community that political scientists Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba labeled a “civic culture” in 1965, a political culture in which “there is a substantial consensus on the legitimacy of political institutions and the direction and content of public policy, a widespread tolerance of a plurality of interests and belief in their reconcilability, and a widely distributed sense of political competence and mutual trust in the citizenry.”¹¹ When Almond and Verba asked respondents in five democratic countries to list the things about their country of which they were most proud, 85 percent of the American respondents mentioned governmental and political institutions, compared to 46 percent in the British sample, 30 percent of the Mexicans, 7 percent of the Germans, and 3 percent of the Italians. Much more than the others, Americans reported that a good citizen is one who actively participates in community affairs.¹²

The civic culture was based essentially—though Almond and Verba did not make the analysis—on three ideas widely held by the founders of the republic, the ideas that constituted the basis of what they called republicanism: first, that ordinary men and women can be trusted to govern themselves through their elected representatives, who are accountable to the people; second, that all who live in the political community (essentially, adult white males at the time) are eligible to participate in public life as equals; and third, that individuals who comport themselves as good citizens of the civic culture are free to differ from each other in religion and in other aspects of their private lives.

That third idea was the basis for a kind of voluntary pluralism in which immigrant settlers from Europe and their progeny were free to maintain affection for and loyalty to their ancestral religions and cultures while at the same time claiming an American identity by embracing the founding myths and participating in the political life of the republic. It was a system of pluralism that began, principally, in colonial Pennsylvania, where immigrants of various nationalities and religious backgrounds moved with relative ease into political life. This new invention of Americans—voluntary pluralism—in which individuals were free to express their ancestral affections and sensibilities, to choose to be ethnic, however and whenever they wished or not at all by moving across group boundaries easily, was sanctioned and protected by a unifying civic culture based on the American founding myth, its institutions, heroes, rules, and rhetoric.

The system would not be severely tested as long as most immigrants were English or Scots. The new republic, as George Washington said in his farewell address, was united by “the same religion, manners, habits and political principles.”¹³ But differences in religion, habits, and manners proliferated after the immigration of large numbers of Germans (many of whom were Catholic), Scandinavians, and Irish Catholics throughout the last sixty years of the nineteenth century, and of eastern and southern Europeans, a majority of whom were Catholic or Jewish, in the decade before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Political principles remained the core of national community. The new immigrants entered a process of ethnic-Americanization through participation in the political system, and, in so doing, established even more clearly the American civic culture as a basis of American unity.