Americans are an impatient people, nowhere more so than in the world of politics. We want fast solutions to complicated issues. That’s why candidates for political office promise quick fixes for whatever ails us – fixes so quick they can be summarized in a sound byte and accomplished “on Day One of my administration.”
Invariably, Day One comes and goes, then 100 days, and the promises are either unkept or broken, leaving us to fume in frustration.
What we’re taught in school – an overview of the three branches of government, the checks and balances, the Bill of Rights, and often an illustrated or even animated description of how a bill makes its way into law – reinforces our expectation of quick results. In textbook government, once a serious problem is identified, Congress and the president address it. Political differences are set aside to advance the public good. Problems are solved, or at least eased, and prevented from recurring.
Is it wrong to promote student patriotism and civic responsibility by emphasizing the positive? Is it wrong to encourage children to believe in Santa Claus? Debatable issues. The fact remains that in reality, for the most part, progress made through American democratic politics consists of a slow, but fairly steady, series of minor victories achieved through reluctant compromises between Republicans and Democrats. Understandably, the snail’s pace can lead to frustration, anger, and disappointment. There is consolation, though, in knowing that however belabored the process, small and/or partial victories are more the norm than the exception. In 1906 Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, turned the stomach of Americans about the meat industry, with its inhumane slaughter methods, unsanitary storage practices, and unsafe working conditions. Public outrage led President Theodore Roosevelt to read the riot act to the meat industry, and with the cooperation of Congress, get legislation passed to remove the abuses and assure the public safe meat consumption.
How that happened was complex and cumbersome. TR asked the Commissioner of Labor and a New York Attorney General to undertake an independent investigation. Its report indicated that Sinclair, if anything, had understated the problems. Roosevelt threatened to release the report unless the meat packers halted their misconduct. When he learned that the packers still intended to resist government regulation, he had Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge introduce a regulatory bill as an amendment to a House Agricultural Appropriations Bill to make sure funds were available for hiring sufficient inspectors to enforce the legislation.
But the meat-packer lobby succeeded in whittling down and stalling the Beveridge draft. With Congress set to adjourn shortly, for a while it appeared that no action would take place.
The Meat Inspection Act that emerged two years later allowed for a day and evening inspection system, banned non-inspected meats from interstate commerce, gave the agricultural secretary the authority to set sanitary standards, and provided ample funding for enforcement. But it contained no provisions for dating meat labels, and still left the courts as the final judge of the agricultural secretary’s rulings.
Why the slowness?
The best answer, according to William Greider in Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy (1992) is “democracy, at its core, is plodding work and requires a heroic sense of patience.”
The Constitution intentionally divided power among three branches of government without party affiliation. The unplanned rise of political parties in the late 18th century meant the Founders’ original hope – that government officials would act impartially based on the merits of an issue – did not materialize.
The result has been that when the parties deeply disagree, and neither holds a majority in both houses of Congress, not only is it difficult for a president to govern, but there’s not much that can be done about it. There’s little chance, for instance, that President Obama can persuade his political opponents to support policies on high profile matters when they plan to run for election or re-election as opponents of those very same policies, i.e., Obamacare. The chief executive can do much better with those already predisposed to support him, and even then often must bring them across the finish line by persuasion, bribery, and arm twisting.
The same dynamic explains why campaign promises stated as broad generalities cannot be kept. They have to go through a rigorous and partisan legislative process before becoming a law.
Partisanship plays a critical role as well in determining what bills will make it to the floor, whether they will be endlessly modified or run into a filibuster in the Senate that requires a two-thirds vote to override.
Filibusters, originally intended as a protection of free speech and a guard against majorities steam-rolling minorities, permit a single Senator to hold the floor, speaking on any topic he or she chooses, until debate is brought to a close by at least 60 out of 100 Senators. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina set the individual record of 24 hours and 18 minutes in his attempt to stop the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. He began with readings of each state’s election laws, in alphabetical order, moved on through a variety of other documents, including the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s Farewell Address, and his own grandmother’s biscuit recipe.
In addition to the filibuster option, today a single Senator can place a “hold” on legislation or nominations being considered by notifying the leadership in writing of his or her objection. This is often done secretly and, in effect, can draw out the process indefinitely. This maneuver has been used as a means of extracting executive concessions for the Senator’s home state.
New funding for desirable but expensive programs also runs up against many speed bumps, most formidably a federal budget in which 64% goes toward defense, Social Security, and major health programs. Safety-net programs like food stamps and low-income housing assistance and interest on the national debt take another 9% each, leaving 18 % for funding everything else, old and new, including a wide variety of public services from scientific research to benefits for veterans. Pork-barrel projects – like the notorious bridge to nowhere in Alaska — though of benefit to local constituents, frequently come at the expense of national interests. They bypass normal congressional appropriations and competitive processes to claim chunks of what’s left. Finding money to pay for large, worthwhile endeavors, even when good will exists, is a slow, belabored process.
The political clout of interest groups – chambers of commerce, unions, industry lobbies – also plays a considerable part in time-consuming modifications of an original bill. Take for example the 1990 Senate debate over clean-air legislation. Chapters of Big Brother and Big Sister wrote and lobbied their Senators, as did the Georgia Baptist Convention, the Easter Seal Society of South Dakota, and the Delaware Paralyzed Veteran’s Association, in opposition to a pending amendment that would force the auto industry to improve the fuel efficiency of its cars and reduce their carbon foot print. (This amendment to the Clean Air Act of 1963 did pass.) It takes time to process and respond to concerned constituencies like these.
In light of the above pulls, tugs, and drags on the legislative process, let’s set aside the image of “Mr. Bill” skipping merrily through Congress on his way to be signed into law by the president. He has had a tough journey from the get-go since being introduced by a Congressional member, his sponsor. He had to be read in the chamber, and reported on to the appropriate committee for debates, followed by changes or amendments. Then if not tabled because he was deemed unwise or unnecessary, it’s back to a subcommittee for more intense study before going back to the House for a vote.
Time delays operate even in the best case scenario of one party holding both the presidency and an overwhelming majority in Congress. The Democratic Party Platform in the 1932 election pledged to pass a bill providing for unemployment and old age insurance. Yet it was not until two years later, despite the landslide victory, that two bills made it to Congress from the Committee on Economic Security appointed by FDR and headed by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. This was probably because Roosevelt wanted to seize ownership of these issues for himself and make them into a 1936 campaign issue. Hence, he appointed a presidential commission, the Committee on Economic Security, to draft new legislation featuring a federally run cradle-to-grave welfare system for all Americans, and including a national system of health care that complicated the negotiations.
Finally, the president tempered his vision for fiscal reasons (and questions of constitutionality), and backed a plan that would be financed by a regressive tax on the workers themselves, and would pay benefits in proportion to previous earnings. All of this took time, much of it spent in frequent and belabored discussions about which groups to include and exclude from old-age coverage. The Social Security Act became law in 1935, the first payroll deductions waited until 1937, and the first distributions – a monthly check for $41.30 — were disbursed in 1940, approximately eight years after that landslide victory and its apparent mandate.
When a single party has a smaller majority in Congress, or the president and congressional majority come from opposing parties, or different parties control the House and Senate, or there is significant disagreement even among members of the same party, legislation is not only slow, it’s more limited in scope. A recent case in point is the Obama Health Care Plan, which passed in March, 2010, after a bitter and lengthy fight. First the president had to win over “Blue Dog” Democrats, fiscal conservatives who objected to the high cost and wanted reassurance no federal monies would find their way into abortion-providing clinics. Liberal Democrats were angry about the lack of an option to purchase government insurance policies. Republicans were hostile to all parts of the plan because of the price, and also as social policy, especially the part that called for every American to buy insurance and penalties for those who didn’t.
Yet, as a result of frequent negotiations, and modifications sufficient to win over Democratic doubters, the President managed to eke out a narrow victory. The margin in the House was 219-212, with not a single Republican voting “yes.” In the Senate, enough Republicans crossed over to avoid a filibuster and allow the bill to reach a vote and pass.
Ah, but once a bill is passed, it can later be challenged – all the way up to the Supreme Court. S-l-o-w-l-y. At this writing, the present Supreme Court is currently deliberating the constitutionality of the entire bill, and its individual parts.
When times appear desperate, quicker legislation becomes possible. During the Great Depression, FDR initially received carte blanche to halt all bank operations, suspend anti-trust laws, and assist the 25% unemployed by setting up relief and work creation programs via the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The threat of an economic collapse in 2008 led a very divided Congress to approve quickly $800 billion in bailout money to save big banks and other financial giants from going under. This same gridlocked Congress later agreed, however reluctantly, on budget cuts to keep the government from shutting down.
Any of the factors mentioned above, singly and in combination, can affect the speed at which change happens. The maddeningly slow pace makes us wonder: Do our elected leaders not hear us? They do, but they listen most carefully when failing to listen threatens to cost them their jobs. Getting reelected is their default position, justified by the fact that they can’t accomplish anything at all if they’re not there.
They also listen because they care, and, as individuals, they often agree. But they must still take what they hear, care about, and agree with through a tortoise-paced process. That’s democracy’s weakness and also its strength. Let the analogy be duly noted: In the fable of The Tortoise and the Hare, slow and steady wins the race. The upside of the tortuous process whereby a bill becomes law is that it enhances political stability. All constituencies (not equally) have a chance to speak their piece; the losing ones are not sent to prison or exiled abroad, and the system is coup proof.
Though time-lapse photography may be needed to capture it, the American political landscape is in a constant state of change. As a wise mother once advised her daughter, “Boyfriends are like buses. If you don’t catch one, there’ll be another along in ten minutes.” Pretty much the same goes for legislation, but substitute the voting booth for the bus stop. In either case, to have any hope of getting what we want, we need to show up, stand up, and be patient.
SOME SOURCES AND RESOURCES
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (2012)
David Mayhew, Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Don’t Kill the U.S. Political System (2011)
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The United States is well on the road from racism to racialism, but that’s not the same as moving toward a post-racist society.
Racism refers to notions of superiority and inferiority dictated by unfounded beliefs about cultural, intellectual, historical, and physical differences, including color. Racism leads to efforts to impose domination and/or separation along those perceived lines of differentiation.
Racialism refers to a group of people belonging to the same stock, and/or unified by history, habits, and interests, who may choose to associate primarily with their own. Racialism centers on a minority group’s positive self-perception and on the majority’s openness to difference.
Even in slavery, blacks created an informal culture that sought to preserve memories, customs, and cuisine brought from their homelands. They formed their own churches, which provided comfort and hope. Past and present experiences held in common continue to build a sense of community. At the same time, the trend toward “multiculturalism” that began in the 1960s indicates the majority’s growing acceptance of and respect for minority distinctions.
Post-racism refers to a place where no one thinks about race anymore and where economic opportunity and political participation operate in a race-free environment.
Obviously, America is not a post-racist country. The blurry line dividing the other two appellations — racism and racialism — is crossed daily in overt and subtle ways. The line’s vagueness and the sometimes inadvertent crossing of it reflect the very different American experiences of blacks and whites. The recent shooting death in Sanford,Florida, of unarmed, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain, for instance, was seen by many blacks as another instance of racial profiling. But feelings of outrage and sadness and a demand for justice crossed all racial borders.
RACISM
Slaves brought to these shores beginning in the 1600s were treated as property, and portrayed as children who needed to be taken care of — lazy, promiscuous, intellectually inferior, unattractive, deceptive, and dangerous. They worked from dawn to dusk while the threat of the whip hovered over them. The break up and sale of families occurred regularly. Nothing good came from a racist system that denied its victims autonomy, the essence of what it means to be a human being.
The end of Reconstruction (1865-1877) was the beginning of nearly one hundred years of government-sanctioned racism under the misleading label of “separate but equal.” “Uppity negroes” were kept in place by economic intimidation and violence —beatings, lynchings, cross burnings, and race riots.
Resistance to the end of the “Jim Crow laws” in the South (1954) was expressed in six murders, twenty-nine firearm casualties, forty-four beatings, and sixty bombings in a single year.
Our country’s legally racist society persisted for nearly 250 years because African-Americans were exempted from the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. Well into the Civil War, preserving the Union, not ending slavery, was the foremost objective. Later, the judiciary upheld the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws, including the Supreme Court landmark decision in Plessy v.Ferguson (1896), which let stand the decision to jail Homer Plessy, considered an African-American because he was one-eighth black, for sitting in a Lousianna railroad car meant for whites.
Racism reared its ugly head throughout the heyday of the civil rights movement. Police beat peaceful protestors and jailed thousands of marchers. The bombing of a Birmingham church killed four little black girls, buses carrying northern freedom riders were overturned and set on fire, and three student voter registration volunteers in Mississippi were tortured and murdered. OnMarch 7, 1965, thousands of voting-rights advocates planned to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery only to come up against a police riot, now known as Bloody Sunday, that sent seventy demonstrators to the hospital.
Given their abandonment by the legal system and the antagonism or apathy of most whites, it’s not surprising that blacks took the lead in the quest to end racism. Figures like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Dr. Martin Luther King, among many others, rose to prominence promoting freedom and equality in their times.
RACIALISM
While race still matters in the United States, racialism means it matters less. Examples abound of how racialism has replaced racism in virtually every area of American life.
The last large “race riot” took place in 1991 in South Central Los Angeles following the videotaped brutal beating of black motorist Rodney King and an all-white jury’s subsequent acquittal of the officers involved. Though they didn’t riot, many whites, along with the majority of blacks, felt and expressed outrage at the injustice.
During the recent 47th anniversary commemoration of the march from Selma to Montgomery, the cause invoked was a protest against legislation forcing voters to show an identification card at the polls. While such legislation will make it harder for minorities to exercise their franchise, it’s a far cry from the pervasive racism that gave rise to earlier marches. In the words of Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who suffered a concussion during the Selma violence, the most noteworthy difference between then and now is “the distance we have come…. The governor then wouldn’t let us come to the steps of the [Alabama] capitol. This is a very moving day for me . . . .”
There are no more mass civil rights demonstrations on the order of those in the 1960s. The largest one in post-civil rights America took place in Jena,Louisiana, in 2006, a racially mixed town of about 3,000, where 20,000 African-American demonstrators gathered to protest the unfair sentences meted out to six black students who had beaten a white student unconscious. The beating was in retaliation for the dangling of nooses from an oak tree by white students after a black student had asked sit in the shade of the tree “by custom” reserved for whites.
“There is a Jena in every state,” the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the assembled protestors. Yet most Jena blacks and whites resented their town being portrayed as a cauldron of bigotry. While race relations there were not unblemished, they had improved significantly over time. “You have good people here and bad people here, on both sides,” said one black resident. “This thing has been blown out of proportion.” The “Jena 6” march, unlike those of the 60s, had no coattails, nor did the protest result in backlash.
Another example of the transition to a racialist America is African-Americans’ success in removing much of the negativity associated with color by changing the connotations of darkness. Black has become beautiful and not just for blacks. Furthermore, the recent preference for being called blacks instead of African-Americans suggests greater comfort in being perceived first and foremost as black Americans.
A 2011 Gallup poll showed 86% of whites approved of marriage between blacks and whites, up from 48% in 1991. Once frowned upon as “miscegenation” and illegal, black-white marriages increased sevenfold, from 51,000 to 363,000, between 1960 and 2000. A Cornell-Ohio State analysis found that black-white marriages went from 3% in 1980 to 10.7% in 2008.
Today, black actors are cast in a variety of roles as heroes and villains, leaders and led, wealthy and poor, happy and sad. Interracial romances and friendships are common; black or interracial couples kissing and making love on the screen no longer shock. In the popular culture reflected in the mass media, blacks are portrayed as complex and diverse.
Contrast that with the 1960s, when Sidney Poitier was given the male lead in the interracial romance Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? To allay white audience backlash, the character he played was a physician of rare combined attributes: wealthy, intelligent, handsome, well-dressed, articulate, and cultured. The Cosby Show of the 1980s featured a doctor dad and a lawyer mom who raised beautiful children on good, old-fashioned, colorblind, middle-class values.
Today, African-Americans abound in the mass media as anchors, reporters, entertainers and models, despite the virtual end of affirmative action policies mandating ethnic group representation.
Blacks are present in the highest levels of government as well. Two recent Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, were African-Americans. There is a Black Caucus in the House of Representatives.
Only a year before Barack Obama’s election, in perhaps the worst-titled book in recent times, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win, conservative African-American intellectual Selby Steele argued that Obama could not win the presidency because he could not serve the aspirations of one race without betraying that of the other. Though the reasons for his victory are very complex, that Obama did win the nation’s highest office given the country’s racist past indicates that something new is in the air in racialist America.
A racialist society is not free of racial insensitivity or hyper-sensitivity. We learn as we go – but we are learning. Radio host Don Imus described the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” Imus was fired. Black syndicated columnist Dewayne Wickham was unhappy that Tiger Woods did not make a bigger deal of it when golf analyst Kelly Tilghman — Woods’ longtime friend — suggested his competitors might consider lynching him. Tilghman apologized. During Obama’s run for president, then rival Joe Biden labeled him as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Biden was taken to task, and then became Obama’s choice for Vice President.
An area of great sensitivity for blacks is being lumped together indiscriminately and deemed guilty by association. Umbrage is understandably taken, for instance, at the stereotyping of young, black males as invariably fatherless, drug-ridden, violent, and prison-bound. The recent shooting death in Florida of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin has brought attention to this issue, even while the feelings of sadness and outrage have crossed all racial borders.
In the aftermath of the August, 2011, random physical assaults and property damage on the streets of downtown neighborhoods adjacent to the University of Pennsylvania, many residents found off-putting the African-American mayor’s dressing down of the vandals — “You have damaged your race” — delivered before law-abiding citizens dressed in their Sunday best at a worship service.
Likewise, when in a May, 2004, address commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, comedian Bill Cosby went after young blacks immersed in a gangsta lifestyle of casual violence and male chauvinism, many in the African-American community denounced his remarks as vicious, untrue, and one-sided.
It should be noted that whites may well agree with blacks on both sides of sensitive issues, further evidence that the line between racism and racialism is in the process of being defined.
Music has long been a gateway to black acceptance in a white-dominated society and can now be seen as a harbinger of progress from racism to racialism. Unlike Cab Calloway and others, black artists no longer find themselves performing in venues that deny them admittance as patrons. On the flip side, the traditionally black Apollo Theatre in Harlem recently welcomed the debut presentation of Bruce Springsteen’s latest album with none of the alarm that met the appearance there of Buddy Holly in the 1950s.
Rap began as a rhythmic, verbal means of self-expression in the 1970s and became a major part of popular culture beginning in the 1990s. Early artists like Grandmaster Flash offered political commentary about life in the ghetto, and like many peers, distanced himself from gang culture. Ironically, hip-hop’s largest audience has always been young white males living in suburbia, perhaps bored with their less exciting lifestyles.
Current critical focus on gangsta rap does not deny the influence of more quintessential black musical genres. The creative rhythms and exuberance of jazz must be included in any discussion of American music. Blues and gospel heal and give hope to all listeners. Forerunners of rock ‘n roll, these forms continue to inspire musicians and audiences of all kinds and all races.
High profile incidents of racism persist in racialist America: the 1997 sodomizing of Abner Louima in a Brooklyn police station, for instance, and the shooting deaths of four unarmed black citizens byNew Orleans police officers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Racial sensitivity is also evident in the added dilemma African-Americans face in having to show their blackness in acceptable ways to other members of the group while bumping up against white and black expectations about their blackness in the workplace and social settings. In no circumstances do whites have to prove their whiteness. Though they continue to lag behind those of whites, black salaries have improved, but the gap in wealth from stocks and other non-salary forms of income remains astronomically high. Too many blacks continue to experience daily injustices such as cabbies refusing to stop for them on city streets. Still, none of this negates Congressman Lewis’s observation about how far we have come.
To describe our country as racialist is not the same as designating it post-racist. A color-blind society in which race is no longer an issue or impediment to progress and in which we all see each other as individuals is an inspirational myth that remains in the realm of what ought to be but never can be. Taken to its extreme, post-racism also suggests a society that denies individuality, history, and heritage.
Human beings cannot avoid noting differences, including color. What matters is what we do with what we see.
SOME SOURCES AND RESOURCES
Nell Irwin Painter, The History of White People (2010)
Randall Kenan, The Fire This Time (2007)
Nikky Finney, Head Off and Split (2011)
Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black (2012)
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The topic of immigration is fertile ground in this country to a variety of popularly held myths. We extoll with misty eyes our Statue of Liberty, lifting her lighted torch above the oft-quoted words of poet Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Nowhere does Liberty’s pedestal mention our other set of oft-quoted words used to greet immigrants: greenhorn, wetback, mick, wop, dago, kike, polack, bohunk, chink, spook, nip, dink, paki, spik, gook . . .
The Green Lady in the Harbor is herself fraught with irony. She was never meant to welcome anyone, and arrived at a time when backlash against immigrants was picking up steam. Dedicated on October 26, 1886, she was a gift from France meant to symbolize a path of enlightenment for the countries of Europe still battling tyranny and oppression at home. Instead, she became an invitation to come on over and seek a new life free of ethnic and religious persecution here. Millions kept her inspiring torch in sight as they made their way to Ellis Island and met up with the first of many dichotomies woven into the American welcome mat: Rich people passed right through customs; everyone else was subjected to lengthy, frightening, and often humiliating intake procedures.
Sometimes, we take pride in the notion of America as a melting pot, a salad bowl, a mosaic of cultures. We enjoy pizza, goulash, mangers, salsa, gyros, pad thai, and sushi. We tout the varied influences on our fashion, décor, art, theater, music, and dance.
Other times, we take offense. The events of September 11, 2001, cast new suspicions on all Muslims within our borders, whatever their national origin and including those born in the United States. Hard economic times have brought a hailstorm of protest against illegal immigrants from Central andSouth America who allegedly steal jobs belonging to our own citizens.
We’re also known to reminisce fondly about a time when immigrants were hard-working patriots who quickly learned English, assimilated, and contributed to the common good. We rankle at the current crop who insist on maintaining their own hyphenated national identities, languages, and mysterious ways. Immigrants, it’s claimed, have turned our schools into Towers of Babel. As more public signage and legal forms appear in Spanish as well as English, a clamor grows in favor of one official language.
Recent sentiments, yes. But hardly new ones. As with so much in our national drama, the cast of characters changes over the years, but the plot remains remarkably consistent. The “outs” struggle long and hard to become the “ins,” then turn around and defend themselves against perceived threats by the next batch of “outs.” Most current attitudes mimic discrimination against earlier immigrants. Whether they were Jewish or Catholic, African, Irish, East European, Southern European, or in some other way non-white, non-Protestant, non-educated, non-skilled, and/or non-wealthy, there was always somebody waiting on these shores to pronounce them unwelcome.
Much of this attitude is based on a skewed portrait of our national heritage in which Americans saw themselves as descendents of a special branch of the Caucasian race that arrived in the early and mid-1600s: liberty-loving, white, mostly English, Anglo-Saxons. Only the “English race,” supposedly, had retained the Teutonic legacy, described 700 years earlier by the historian Tacitus, of “local self government combined with central representation.”
Though not overtly racist, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson acknowledged the leading role Anglo-Saxons played in the new nation’s development. Indeed, in the very act of revolution, the colonists were reinforcing their links with their assumed ancestors by separating from a mother country that violated their liberties. By the mid-19th century, American historians Herbert Baxter Adams, Stanley Burgess, and a bit later John Fiske, taught as gospel that American democracy traced back to the superior qualities of its Anglo-Saxon founders.
This myth of Anglo-Saxon superiority was used to justify the suffering or deaths of Mexicans, Indians, and blacks, and to force new immigrants to conform to the prevailing economic, political, and social system as established by their Anglo-Saxon predecessors. Appreciation of other manly, blue eyed Aryans followed: Teutons from the German states, and Norsemen from Scandinavia.
The national myth of an American democracy solely begotten by an Anglo-Saxon race, as exemplified by the Puritans, excluded the displaced tribes already here and ignored the contributions of other immigrants who also arrived in the 17th and early 18th centuries – Scots Irish, Irish, French, Dutch, Swiss, and Spanish fleeing economic destitution or religious persecution or hoping to establish commercial ventures. Ditto the back-breaking yet essential work of thousands of indentured servants condemned to endless debt and poverty and Africans brought here against their will. Of these non-Aryan masses, none other than Ben Franklin worried in 1753 that “. . . they will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have, we will not . . . be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”
The myth of “true” Americans as white, Protestant, land-owning, educated, and English-speaking persisted – and, in some circles, continues to persist. In its spirit, the Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1795 made it increasingly difficult for the non-white and non-wealthy to achieve citizenship.
In the early 1800s, when the Irish came to work on the Erie and other canal-building projects, they were not greeted with enthusiasm, in spite of the need for their labor. An 1854 article in the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party newspaper remarked, “. . . rum shops sprung up at every corner of the street, drunkards staggered in every alley, while prostitution reared its brothels at every thoroughfare leading to us, and held carnival in the very heart of the city itself.”
Anti-Irish sentiments continued into the early decades of the 20th century. By way of contrast, in the 1870s and the 1880s, thousands of promotional leaflets went out to Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians to populate areas where railroad companies offered to sell them land they had received for a song from the U.S. government as compensation for building railroads in the West.
The influx of some 20 million southern and eastern Europeans beginning in the 1870s revived fervid anti-immigration sentiments. These southern Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews, driven off the land by pogroms and other hostilities, were deemed incapable of assimilation, being by nature stupid, clannish, and dangerous. They practiced the wrong religions – Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Judaism. They dressed funny, sported whiskers, and looked filthy. Some had a past as trade unionists, socialists, and anarchists – potential troublemakers all.
Late 19th century groups like the American Protective Association and Immigration Restriction League demanded protection for American workers against the onslaught of immigrants and protested against the practice of naturalizing aliens. The Exclusion Act of 1882 banned further immigration of the very same Chinese who had been instrumental in building the transcontinental railroad. In Rock Spring, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885, whites attacked five hundred Chinese miners, massacring twenty eight of them in cold blood.
Concern with white non-Nordic groups continued as well. The reports coming out of the Dillingham Commission (1907-1911) reaffirmed that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were racially inferior and posed a serious threat to American society. The Commission, composed of House and Senate members, urged restrictions on non-Nordic immigration.
These attitudes received affirmation from the so-called “scientific” racism of the period that postulated an inherent racial hierarchy in which these groups occupied a bottom ranking. Madison Grant, in his 1916 best seller The Passing of the Great Race, claimed that undesirable physical and intellectual qualities of non-Nordic immigrants could be grafted onto the American Stock: “If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without controls . . . the type of native American of Colonial descent will become extinct.”
Physical aggression against Asians subsided by the outbreak of WWI to be replaced by vicious sentiments directed against Americans of German descent. Under the direction of George Creel, the Committee on Public Information mobilized public support for the war in part by showing the dangers Germans, including their American-born kin, posed to the American way of life. Articles reported that German spies were everywhere. Posters portrayed Germans as Huns, mad beasts carrying off innocent American women to ravish. The teaching of the German language in schools was prohibited; sauerkraut and German measles were renamed “liberty cabbage” and “liberty measles.”
Soon after World War I ended, America found itself caught up in a Red Scare. The new enemy was communists abroad and at home. American immigrants who came from Russia, or were suspected of having past ties to communism or socialism, were deemed suspicious and subject to severe scrutiny. Foreign born laborers were disproportionately blamed for the wave of strikes besetting the nation in response to wage cuts and layoffs. In November, 1919, the government deported around 250 radical aliens, including the notorious anarchist “Red Emma” Goldman.
The Ku Klux Klan, whose size and political influence reached its zenith in the early 1920s, not only lashed out against blacks, but also Jewish, Catholic, and east European immigrants. The growing antipathy to the post 1870 wave of “the wrong stuff” encouraged the National Quota Acts of 1921 and 1924, severely limiting annual European immigration. The 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration Act imposed further restrictions.
World War II saw less anti-German sentiment because they had dispersed, no longer living in “little Germanies.” The main villains became 110,000 first and second generation Japanese, who were herded into camps in remo te areas of California, Wyoming, and Arizona and whose property was confiscated and sold off to white Americans. One of the few ways to avoid internment was to serve in the U.S.military; the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese-Americans, was the most decorated American unit in the European war theater.
A game changer came with the 1965 Immigration Act that allowed more immigrants from the Third World. In part, the shift was meant to address charges by Cold War rivals that despite paying lip service to equality among all peoples, American immigration policies discriminated against those with yellow, brown, or black skin. Emphasis shifted to recruitment based on skill level, not country of origin. In the 1980s and 1990s, numbers were raised to accommodate family-based immigration.
Contrary to popular belief about the rapid and eager assimilation of early immigrants, most new arrivals dispersed to big cities where they gravitated to neighborhoods already settled by kinsmen who had maintained aspects of the old culture, from language to cuisine to houses of worship, restaurants and taverns. While ethnic quarters like a Germantown or Little Italy formed recognizable but not exclusionary areas, Chinese and black sections were less integrated because of formal and informal segregation. Lowly though the poor white immigrant might be, he was still white.
The new denizens toiled in specific industries depending on opportunity, availability, skill level, and influence. The Irish hung steel from the sky, and together with the Chinese built the railroads. The Chinese also opened laundries, not from a love of detergent but because it was one of the few other areas permitted for them to work. Slavs went to the coal fields of Pennsylvania and the stockyards of Chicago. Jews worked as peddlers and merchants and in garment sweat shops, along with Italians. The same willingness to do whatever’s available remains evident in the current influx of migrant workers, legal and illegal, from Mexico, Central, and South America.
The 1960s witnessed a surge in “hyphenated Americans”: African-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Japanese-Americans, to name a few. The process was part of a broader movement by people long ignored by historians who told the American story through the eyes of Great White American Males. That group’s reputation sank when it was blamed for getting the country into the Vietnam conflict, and ignoring injustices and lack of equal opportunity for those at the bottom of society. A revolt triggered by young people challenged the cultural and political hegemony of the establishment. Immigrants joined African-Americans and women in the broader demand for affirmation and recognition of their participation in American history.
While laudable in many ways, and far closer to the truth about our country than the long-cherished myth of the One True American, the shift to multiculturalism carries with it the danger of distorting how immigrants actually fit into the development of the United States; that is, first and foremost by becoming American citizens, and secondarily as carriers of ethnic identities. It should be noted that the word “American” receives the stress in these hyphenated identities.
Since the founding of the Republic, more than 150 different ethnic groups have come to these shores. Today about one in every ten American residents is an immigrant, a high figure but below the 15% in 1890. And still they come. Why? And how have they managed to survive – even prosper– considering our history of bad behavior?
For all its shortcomings,America has always been more welcoming than most countries, and the potential for a good life is still better here. Immigrants continually remind us of that. We see it in the joy and gratitude expressed at naturalization ceremonies, and we see it in their outstanding contributions. To name only a very few of many major contributors: Alexander Graham Bell (Scotland), Jonas Salk (Poland), Albert Baez (Mexico), Nicholas Tesla (Croatia), Subranh Manyan (India), Bjarne Stroustrup (Denmark), Joseph Pulitzer (Hungary), I.M. Pei (China), Irving Berlin (Russia), Ang Lee (Taiwan), Mariah Cary (Venezuela) . . . .
According to a recent study by the Partnership for a New American Economy, two in five Fortune 500 companies “had at least one founder who was an immigrant, or was raised by someone who immigrated to theUnited States.”
There are no comparable lists of massive and lasting damages inflicted by infamous immigrants. And still some cling to the myth of the One True American, and others struggle to define who we really are. Mid-18th century essayist Jean Saint de Crevecour wrote, “What, then, is this new man, the American? They are a mixture of English, Scottish, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, have arisen.”
Being a man of his time, he left out a lot of us, but he called it right: We were then, as we are now, unlike any other nation of people on earth. We continue to be a work in progress, and in the words of the late comedian Jack Paar, “Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.”
SOME SOURCES AND RESOURCES
Jacob Riis, HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES (1890)
Madison Grant, THE PASSING OF THE GREAT RACE (1916)
Charles Hirschman, “The Impact of Immigration on American Society: Looking Backward to the Future,” http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/Hirschman .
Immigration Impact, http://immigrationimpact.com .
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WHILE THE CAT’S AWAY
We continue our examination of American economics with another metaphor involving rodents: While the cat’s away (deregulation), the mice will play. Small mice may try to scam food stamp limitations by purchasing a meatball sandwich, not on the list of allowed items. Medium-sized mice might pay under-the-table salaries to illegal nannies. Really big mice gobble up everything in sight.
Fortunately, though often reluctantly, our free market eventually accedes to pressures to temper many of its harmful practices. History tells us that the cat can be lured home, difficult though it may be to herd cats, with bait set by government, big business, and the rest of us.
As discussed here in Part I, Adam Smith laid out the model for capitalism’s strengths in his book The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. His commentary significantly underestimated the skullduggery of the very wealthy when given the opportunity to run free, a miscalculation echoed by contemporary worshippers of the free market. Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve, was among those who assumed that “the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such as they were best capable of protecting their shareholders and their equity in the firms.” When the housing bubble burst in 2008, Greenspan expressed shock that his presumption did not pan out.
Alexander Hamilton, who served as the new nation’s Secretary of the Treasury from 1789 to 1795, would not have been so surprised. He understood the strengths and weaknesses of business leaders: “ . . . that valuable class of citizens forms too important an organ of the general weal not to claim every practicable and reasonable exemption and indulgence.” Left unchecked, however, “. . . their desire for lucre could shade over into noxious greed.”
The question for Hamilton was how to get rapacious predators—shady captains of industry and finance—to moderate exclusive pursuit of their own desires and subsume those desires to the public interest.
We’re still wrestling with that question.
Hamilton’s answer was to give them a stake in a government that promoted their interests sufficiently, but not mindlessly, so their awareness would reach beyond profits to the common good, and they would use some of their fortune for civic causes.
To encourage business leaders not to undermine the national government by financial shenanigans, Hamilton urged funding the national debt at face value, to the delight of speculators who had purchased government securities dirt cheap during the War forIndependence and could now sell them at considerable profit. He also sponsored tariffs to protect infant industries (resulting in higher consumer prices), gave direct subsidies to assist businessmen for startup costs, and chartered the Bank of the United States (essentially a private bank buttressed by public authority) as a dispenser of capital.
Government generosity toward business has dominated our country’s economic history ever since. In the 1800s, it funded public works infrastructures (i.e., the Erie Canal), defraying the staggering building costs for private capital. Protective tariffs, cheap land sales to railroad companies, and tight money policies gave creditors the advantage over debtors. More recent favoritism has allowed a few dominant providers to control most of the broadband landscape (the cables and the wireless spectrum).
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the national government frequently sent troops to put down strikes. President Grover Cleveland, for instance, dispatched the army to enforce compliance with a court injunction prohibiting the 1894 Pullman Strike.
Then, as now, alliances between government and big business were neither conspiratorial nor uniform. They represented shared assumptions that what was good for big business was good for the United States. They also reflected the rotation from business (later corporate) boardrooms to government corridors that left the same people in charge of both making and enforcing policy.
Our national reverence for free markets and individual achievement often means that when the economy goes sour, most of the blame falls on government policies: misguided government decisions, for example, that maintain artificially low interest rates and allow massive infusions of foreign capital from abroad; irresponsible tax cuts; ruinously expensive wars; and the disarming of regulations that should have curbed highly complex, unsupervised, extremely high risk mortgages pushed on loan applicants who couldn’t afford them.
Focusing too much on government miscalculation, however, minimizes corporate and individual blame. It was private, unregulated corporate investors, for instance (i.e. Countrywide Mortgage), not the government-funded Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, who underwrote the vast majority of bad loans between 2001 and 2007, and sold most of them to Wall Street where they were bundled into confoundingly complicated packages.
Unregulated markets cut greed a very wide swath. In the quest for profits, corporations cut corners, sometimes at great cost to the public interest and safety. In the 1970s, for instance, Ford Motors was aware that Pintos were subject to gas-tank explosions when hit in the rear. Rather than fixing the problem by adding a small plastic protective casing to the tank, Ford chose the less expensive option of defending itself in court when sued over fatalities caused by the vehicles. Today, voluntary manufacturer recalls for defective products are often slow in coming.
What has led so many major financial players to engage in borderline, if not outright criminal, practices? Why have they also humiliated underlings, undermined co-workers, and displayed indifference to their customers—in short, swarmed like voracious rodents?
Some blame a culture that focuses solely on profit maximization, the kind of environment where, as former New York Giant manager Leo Durocher said about baseball players, “Nice guys finish last.” On the field and in corporate boardrooms, second place is not good enough.
Others point to personality types prone to aggressiveness, risk taking, self-promotion, and harassment who gravitate to workplaces where those qualities are seen as assets. They thrive in an environment where, as described by best-selling author Michael Lewis, “. . . goodness was not taken into account on the trading floor. It was neither rewarded nor punished. It just was. Or it wasn’t.”
Moreover, unless the actions taken are blatantly illegal, most connivers get off with little more than a slap on the wrist. The list of recent rule breakers and benders is lengthy: Madoff, Keating, Milkin, Lay, Skilling, Enron, Tyco, Health South Corporation, AOL Time Warner, Global Crossing, WorldCom (now MCI), Adelphia, Goldman Sachs . . . . Some shady characters did go to jail, and some corporations (that were left solvent) have paid hefty fines for their transgressions. But not a single senior executive whose firms brought on the mortgage crisis of 2008 has yet to be charged with a crime by the Justice Department or by a civil suit brought by the Securities Exchange Commission.
Today’s culprits have company that spans the centuries: In 1792, the speculative activities of William Duer, a former member of the Continental Congress, led to a colossal securities market crash. Shady manipulations by financiers John Fiske and Jay Gould to corner the gold market on the New York Stock Exchange caused the panic of Black Friday of September 24, 1869. Around 1920, Charles Ponzi’s promise to pay 50% returns in 45 days allowed him to pocket millions of dollars, mostly from poor Italian immigrants. Hence, the term “Ponzi scheme.”
Questionable government decisions and greedy big business share culpability for our nation’s financial woes. But that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. Reckless consumer spending has also played its part in the economy’s decline. No one forces any of us to buy more than we need or to accept mortgage terms that are blatantly too good to be true.
As with business hijinks, the temptation for individuals to spend beyond their means is nothing new. Thomas Jefferson, during his stays inFrance between 1784 and 1789, went on lavish spending sprees. Monticello became a repository, more like a warehouse, for busts by French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, including the very flattering one of Jefferson himself. Jefferson’s collections, according to biographer Joseph Ellis, also included “Indian headdresses, mahogany tables brimming over with multiple sets of porcelain and silver candlesticks, wall-to-wall portraits and prints and damask hangings and full-length gilt-frame mirrors.” In his twilight years, Jefferson paid off his debts by selling the estate he inherited from his wife, along with the slaves who resided and worked there.
The federal government can temper, at least for a while, undesirable or dangerous practices by providing appropriate guidelines and exercising watchdog functions. The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act (1906) prohibited unhealthy and dangerous meat-processing procedures, the Glass-Steagal Act (1933) separated commercial and investment banking, and the Dodd-Frank Bill of 2009 created a bureau to protect consumers from financial fraud.
Government programs face charges of being inefficient, and not only because of the large bureaucracies and high administrative costs. The inherent difficulty is that within the government sector, prices do not reflect the value, costs, and benefits of the programs because they are not market-based but need-determined. Nevertheless, the need is real. (Private ventures are not always paragons of efficiency, either.)
However, stand-alone government programs, irrespective of their cost, success, and efficiency – i.e., Food Stamps, Earned Income Tax Credits, Social Security, Medicare, and Prescription Drug Coverage – provide services that are not sufficiently profitable to attract private capital, or would overwhelm the capacity of private charities. “Entitlement programs” is a misleading term for helping those in need with aid that helps preserve the stability of the free market, contains potential serious unrest, and allows citizens to stay in the game and contribute to the economy.
As for business’s role in keeping excesses in check, we need to remember that most business people are honest and work hard to provide products and services to their customers. This is most obvious in small businesses where transactions tend to be more personal. We rarely stage protest marches against our local hair stylist, pub, or dry cleaner.
It’s easy to be more cynical about large businesses becoming socially and environmentally responsible, but their efforts do represent a shift in orientation. The CEOs of Wal-Mart, Intel, AT&T, and other megabusinesses recently met with union leaders and issued a joint statement calling for quality affordable health care for all Americans. In conjunction with Humana, Wal-Mart offered one of the lowest priced drug prescription plans in the country. Companies like GM, Honda, and Boeing boast of plants that have achieved near zero-landfill status.
Can such efforts be written off as just another business ploy? Yes and no. Companies change when it engenders good publicity and a reputation for corporate citizenship, but what they do must be economically sound as well. DuPont’s initiatives in slashing greenhouse gas emissions saved the company $3 billion, turning its environmental efforts into a way of increasing revenues. That’s good business!
Small groups can also influence business practices. The Sisters of St. Francis, in Philadelphia, have used their investments in retirement funds to buy the minimum number of shares required to submit resolutions at annual shareholder’s meetings. They’ve met with executives from McDonald’s over childhood obesity, Wells Fargo about lending practices, and GE on its building nuclear weapons. Though there is no acknowledged cause and effect, McDonald’s now makes healthier Happy Meals.
Other bottom-up groups that have exercised economic clout through their activities and messages include political action committees like the Tea Party, land preservation organizations, and Occupy Wall Street protests. Their reach can move from the local to the national, and sometimes the international, arena.
Then there are the efforts of individuals, magnified these days by social media. Molly Katchpole, a 23-year-old part-time nanny, launched an online petition that garnered 300,000 signatures and played a critical role in forcing Bank of America to end a planned $5 monthly fee for checking accounts. When Citibank announced usage fees for debit card holders, irate customers responded with hundreds of thousands of signatures over the Internet. Citibank, too, beat a hasty retreat.
Action at the local level begun by ordinary people concerned about the stuff of their daily lives can also modify the free market. Growing health consciousness has led groceries to carry organic foods and fast-food chains to add healthy meal choices to their menus.
Its many faults notwithstanding, over the long run American capitalism has proved adaptable enough, when confronted by critics from above and below, to change enough to keep that criticism from mushrooming into an attack on the system itself.
But there is no “us” and “them” when it comes to modifying capitalism for the better. Government, Wall Street, businesses big and small, and the rest of us are all part of the system, albeit not equal in power to beget problems or rectify them.
We can lure the cat home – or not — by the officials we elect and the elected officials we become, by the businesses we patronize and the businesses we run, by a host of daily, personal choices: earn a living honestly or amass a fortune greedily; gather what we need or accumulate what we want; horde, steal, flaunt, or share.
It’s our cat.
SOME SOURCES AND RESOURCES
Michael Lewis, Liar’s Poker, W.W. Norton, 2010.
Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden, Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery, W.W. Norton, 2011.
Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Armageddon, Times Book:New York, 2011.
For those wanting to see expansive coverage of individuals and small groups working to discover their power to effect civic-minded changes, YES! Magazine is an excellent source: http://www.yesmagazine.org.
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RAT LAB REVISITED
Remember rat lab, the hands-on portion of basic college psychology courses? It was there we learned that random positive reinforcement is a powerful tool for shaping behavior. A rat, a lever, pellets of food. If no pellets ever appeared, the rat gave up pushing the lever. No reward here. If pellets always appeared, then suddenly stopped, the rat gave up pushing the lever. No more rewards here. But if pellets only sometimes appeared, the rat went on pushing that lever, over and over and over again. Always the possibility of a reward here!
Human beings are not rats, but rat lab is all about human behavior. Given the possibility of reward, no matter how improbable, we, too, tend to hang in there. We keep the faith, even when facts give rise to serious doubt.
One would think the stock market, for instance, runs on money. Or, perhaps, greed. Both play their roles, but neither could keep the process going without faith, faith locked in by random positive reinforcement. Keep the rats in mind while we move on to bears: According to Standard and Poor data, there have been no fewer than ten bear markets – a drop of 20% or more — in the United States since the 1930s. They’ve bottomed out for an average of sixteen months before edging upward again, with stocks on average losing 31% of their value at their lowest point. The worst collapse remains the 1929–1932 decline of 83%; the next highest were 49% in 2000–2002 and 48% in 1973.
What happens on Wall Street soon hits Main Street. Given what might be called, at best, a very mixed performance over the years on the part of free market capitalism, why would those times spent “on the brink,” not rile Americans sufficiently to call our entire system into question?
Because we cling to our faith in that system. We believe, and when the going gets tough, we believe harder. The tenets of our credo are as old as our country. They endure because, historically, events have supported them often enough to convince us they’re true. Always the possibility of a reward here! They’re grounded in fundamental principles presented by Scottish philosopher Adam Smith in his classic work, The Wealth of Nations, published the same year the colonies broke away from the mother country.
Smith argued that supply and demand as determined by consumer sovereignty set prices that accurately measured the value of goods and services. He hypothesized the existence of an Invisible Hand (not to be confused with a Divine Hand) that transformed into the common good economic activity driven by self-interest. He saw free markets as efficient, stable, and self-correcting. If the economy got out of sync in one period, it would regain its natural equilibrium in the next.
Commercial transactions, he argued, also fostered improvements in moral behavior by rewarding positive personal traits such as reliability, discipline, helpfulness, and friendliness towards one’s fellow citizens. Free trade created better human beings.
Smith’s ideas were well received in the 1770s because they accorded with colonial objections to mercantilism, with its the government-imposed regulations and taxes attributed by American rebels to the tyrant George III. Smith’s assault on the mercantilist faith gave traction to an alternate set of economic beliefs for the new nation.
Individual sovereignty also resonated with the famous sentiment in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence about the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Material well-being (happiness) was best left to the individual to define and obtain.
The system’s reverential status has endured because it’s been credited with providing equal opportunities for those willing to work hard enough to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Rags-to-riches stories are a recurring theme of America’s economic mythology. At first, rags-to-middle-class-comfort provided happy ending enough; later, middle-class-to-staggering-wealth-and-power became the ideal. In the 19th century, former Unitarian minister Horatio Alger created inspiring tales of the rise of impoverished male children—bootblacks and newsboys, often the sons of widows—who overcame their plight by dint of discipline, honesty, and clean living and ultimately entered the world of middle class respectability.
Not all such stories are fictional. Examples in the real world continue to provide the random positive reinforcement needed to maintain our faith. Currently, we admire the ascent of a money-strapped, single mother’s son to a Harvard education and the Presidency of our country.
But examples can be, and in this case definitely are, the exception rather than the rule. Actual rags-to-riches success in our country has been rare, though social mobility has not. Yet, the best way to get rich in America – or anywhere else – is to luck into one or more wealthy parents. Our highest-born offspring inherit and spend the biggest nest eggs. They go to the right schools, where they meet others just like them and forge bright futures together. For those not born to money, the next-best alternative is to marry it.
Chances are not good that money will simply come along, not in huge amounts, no matter how hard we work. Though Americans rank high among those believing in the ability to get ahead, the facts say otherwise. A 2011 report by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development placed the U.S.tenth in social mobility among industrialized countries. The report noted that a nation’s inequality of wealth impacts its citizens’ ability to improve their lot; the greater the inequality, the greater the difficulty. Brookings Institution economist Isabel Sawhill agrees and adds, “Inequality in one generation may mean less opportunity for the next generation to get ahead and thus, still more inequality in the future.”
Let’s look a little closer at those Horatio Alger stories: Luck as much as pluck determines the hero’s fate, and often shows up in the guise of a benevolent benefactor who happens into the life of the boy in need and jump-starts him on the path to success.
It does happen. Now and then. Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain recounted in his 2011 biography his own Horatio Alger story of how his father told him to keep his nose to the grindstone and to work hard. He followed that advice and rose to become CEO at Godfather Pizza. Okay, but it didn’t hurt that his dad was a chauffeur to the CEO at Coca Cola who was willing to pay for his services in stock shares, and that his father’s connections helped young Cain land a job with Coke after graduate school, where, with help from a mentor (that all-too-rare benevolent stranger), he was introduced to other business opportunities.
There is a dark side to the American Dream, but it’s usually left out of the mythology. Andrew Carnegie’s autobiography, The Gospel of Wealth, tells of a Scottish bobbin boy who came to these shores with just the clothes on his back and became a multimillionaire in the iron and steel industry through hard work and bold ideas.
Carnegie attributes his ascent to superior energy and ability, characteristics that paralleled the Social Darwinian world of nature in which the fittest members of the species predominated. He and his fellow captains of industry perceived themselves as visionaries who stepped into a disorganized economy, restored order and rationality, and provided American consumers the best products and services at the lowest costs: labor-saving devices, more and better food, creature comforts, and parks and theaters.
Carnegie was adamant that he did not amass wealth for its own sake, or to pass on to his heirs. “The man who died rich,” he said, “died disgraced.” The duty of the rich man, while still living, was to use his fortune for projects that advanced the good of the community, in his case, the funding of public libraries. Much appreciated! Really!
But missing from Carnegie’s story are the arduous, dangerous, twelve hour days, six days a week, put in by steel workers in his plants; injuries and deaths from industrial accidents; and strikes in response to wage cuts and longer hours. In 1892, acting in collusion with Henry Frick, chairman of his Homestead Steel Plant seven miles southeast of Pittsburgh, Carnegie went after the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers that had bargained better wages and work rules for the plant’s employees. In response, wage cuts were demanded in a year of record profits. A twelve foot high fence with search light platforms and storage spaces for high powered water hoses was built, and 300 Pinkerton detectives were deployed in anticipation of a strike. When the strike came, bloody clashes left three Pinkertons and seven workers dead.
The union? That died, too.
In 1900, Carnegie earned $23 million compared to the average working man’s wage of $500, and he lived in a 64-room mansion inNew York that took two tons of coal to heat on a typical winter’s day.
Faith in our economic system remains impervious to conflicting evidence, or frontal assault. Most of the time, those below envy, but do not resent those on top. Failure to reach the pinnacle is attributed not to lack of opportunity, but to insufficient talent, unwillingness to make the requisite sacrifices, not daring to take bold risks, laziness, and a lack of lucky breaks.
As long as it occasionally does happen, hope springs eternal among those below that they will eventually join those on top. On top, not one rung up from the current level or even somewhere in the middle. While the American Dream has traditionally been measured by home ownership, of late, it is mansion ownership, and the lifestyle of the rich and famous that goes with it: ostentatious displays of luxury goods, tax breaks and shelters, celebrity. A purgatory in which ownership of a Lexus or Mercedes Benz (bought on credit) is a possibility for middle class “millionaires in waiting” makes failure to ascend endurable, even if it lasts forever. Always the possibility of a reward here!
Trouble arises only when long-term adverse conditions limit the consolation prize to a pre-owned Chevy Aveo. The American Dream is dead! No, the American Dream continues to be exactly what it’s always been: a dream. Yet, given our prevailing myths and those random glimpses of hope, our faith revives it over and over and over again.
American economic reality is something else entirely – rougher going than we like to think, but not an evil thing. Bear in mind that the transparency of our system remains very high compared to most non-capitalist settings, where goods are scarce and the economic infrastructure is all but dysfunctional. The watchdog agency Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer always ranks the United Statesamong the very best in its country by country listings. In those countries ranked lower, nepotism, bribery, and under-the-table transactions accompany virtually all basic economic transactions. By contrast, while connections here can help in getting a job, education, merit, and ability also matter.
So does clear-sighted understanding of how our system works, where it fails, and how it might serve us better. The sad truth for those rats endlessly tapping their fickle levers is that the random reward, if it does come, may be too small and too late. This is a case where it’s imperative not to keep the faith. Rats can’t assess the situation, figure that out, and make a better choice. We can.
To be continued . . .
SOME SOURCES AND RESOURCES
Benjamin Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth (2005)
Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (2007)
Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist (2005)
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Democracy is a slow, messy, sometimes painful business. And yet, our system functions, perhaps better than it logically should. It does so because so much of what the country needs is accomplished outside of formal politics. Millions of Americans volunteer day in and day out, irrespective of political affiliation, to help improve their own lives and the lives of their families, friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. Others accept employment, often at reduced wages, to serve causes in which they believe.
We work alone and in groups. We raise money, hammer in nails, pick up litter, care for stray animals, and look out for one another. Labor organizations, lobbyists, campaign volunteers, social action committees (secular and religious), Neighborhood Watch, food banks, shelters for abused women and the homeless, PTAs, the League of Women Voters, Elks, Lions, and Shriners, tutors and garden clubs, hospices, Scouts, Big Brothers and Big Sisters – to name only a few – do much at the grassroots level that other countries leave to their governments. Sometimes in vain. It’s been wryly but not wrongly observed that whenever two Americans agree that something needs to be done, they form an organization and get to work. Good for us!
One of the great advantages of a democracy is the power of its individual citizens to educate themselves, think for themselves, and speak and act accordingly. And we do so, both in and out of public office. Blanket indictments of present-day American politics make it easy to forget that many American politicians and presidents have displayed considerable courage. They’ve bucked their parties, defied polls, and, yes, risked loss of office to take bold stances. American politicians have never been exclusively a bunch of greedy, ignorant, unethical, stupid bozos. Despite their faults and misdeeds, they are often dedicated, intelligent people, many of whom—believe it!—want to do good for their constituents and their country, even though we might not all agree with their definition of good.
The land of the free has always been the home of the brave. The creation of the United States of America came at a huge cost to its Founders. Almost one in three who signed the Declaration of Independence lost every penny and every piece of property. William Ellery of Rhode Island, for instance, had his house and entire estate burned to the ground. Phillip Livingston, whose family was one of the wealthiest in America in 1776, was driven from his home, which was plundered, and died impoverished two years later. One courageous soul at a time, they came together, weighed the alternatives — knowing full well that they were committing treason against Great Britain — and then risked everything on the Great American Experiment. Ben Franklin’s admonition, “Either we all hang together or, most assuredly, we’ll all hang separately” would not have been spoken or taken lightly.
President Washington’s support for the treaty negotiated with England by ambassador John Jay is one of many examples of courageous politicians taking an unpopular stand. His Democratic-Republican opponents were livid that the agreement did not press the British to make good on compensation for slaves carted off at the close of the Revolution. Nor did it obtain satisfaction for American sailors abducted by the Royal Navy. The President came in for vicious slander that portrayed him as a senile old bumbler who wanted to enact the treaty to elevate himself to king. For Washington, however imperfect the treaty, it prevented a likely suicidal war with Britain for the ill-prepared young country, while it guaranteed America access to overseas trade. Signing the treaty led to a severing of Washington’s relationship with James Madison, father of the Constitution. Washington never again sought his old friend’s counsel, and never invited him back to visit Mount Vernon.
Despite pressure to punish the South severely for seceding from the Union, a move that led to the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s peace plan offered in 1864 was incredibly lenient. After only 10% of those who had voted in 1860 swore their future allegiance to the Union and accepted the end of slavery, rebels could receive a Presidential pardon, and a state could form a civilian government. The generosity of his actions incensed radical members of his own Republican party.
Edmund Ross of Kansas, who disliked Andrew Johnson both personally and politically, defied his fellow Republicans by voting against impeachment of the President for violations of the Tenure of Office bill that forbade Johnson from removing all new office holders without the consent of the Senate. William Pitt Fessenden of Maine also voted to acquit. Their principled votes terminated their political careers.
Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 fully understanding the long-term damage his decision would have on the Democratic Party in the South and on his own reelection prospects.
Mark Hatfield of Oregon was denounced as a traitor at the 1965 National Governors’ Conference for casting the lone “no” vote on a resolution supporting President Johnson’s Vietnam Policy.
Putting principle above party, Republican Barry Goldwater supported the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee despite his fear the vote could cost him his Senate seat.
Gerald Ford was heavily criticized for pardoning President Nixon’s Watergate crimes, but his decision prevented the nation from staying mired in criminal proceedings. Ford also refused to allow Nixon to remove the Watergate tapes to his home in California as part of his Presidential papers. Ford’s actions contributed to his defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy continued fighting for health care reform as he struggled with terminal brain cancer. Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords, shot in the head in January, 2011, returned to a deeply-conflicted Congress to vote in support of raising the debt ceiling that August.
And who could have predicted that Vice President Dick Cheney would come out in favor of gay marriage? But in a speech to the National Press Club, he professed, “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish.”
Individual citizens and what they do – or don’t do – make all the difference, in and out of office. Some say the human frailty of politicians and the certainty of politics as usual make the act of voting pointless. In fact, this is exactly what makes it essential.
Voters have a choice as to whether they will allow frustration and anger to make them cast their votes for candidates way out in right or left field, or choose mainstream candidates from center-left or center-right coalitions who can form a majority that gets things done.
History tells us that, eventually, American voters have always returned to the center. Though a detour induced by rage or inflexibility may affect the length of time serious issues remain stalled or ignored on the back burner, no one party stays in power forever. A tally of the years Republicans and Democrats have held the presidency over the last century (1912–2012) shows a dead heat of 48 to 48. Only once has each party kept the Presidency for more than two terms in a row: Democrats under Roosevelt and Truman (1933–1952) and Republicans under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (1981–1992).
Presidents and members of Congress are individuals, and their individuality makes a difference. It matters a great deal whether the chief executive and representatives elected are Republican or Democratic. They are not, as is sometimes asserted by the disillusioned, merely birds of a feather. Whoever is in office gets to direct the show and chooses the script for setting the country’s political agenda and how it plays out—higher or lower taxes, business credits or tax loopholes, large or small government programs, and military intervention or restraint.
The person in the Oval Office profoundly shapes the country’s mindset by using the bully pulpit to console and rejuvenate the body politic. It wasn’t so much what Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan accomplished that linked them to the broader electorate but the feeling they engendered that people had “a friend in the White House” in the first case or that it was “always morning in America” in the second.
Despite the system’s limitations, faults, and abuses, historically it has adapted to reality (the realm of the possible), and the dynamics for it continuing to do so remain intact. Hold your nose if you have to, but cast your ballot, the single most effective tool for influencing the agenda of politicians of all stripes. Every vote counts. A very different outcome might have occurred in the controversial Bush v. Gore election of 2000 had the confusing “butterfly ballots” and notorious “hanging chads” not come into play.
In practice, the citizenry themselves matter under the American system of government, as individuals and as groups that have the clout to act on, not just talk about, their needs and grievances. When politicians talk about what the American people want, they’re babbling nonsense. There is no such political entity as “the American people.” We, the people, comprise a kaleidoscope of interest groups that shift and realign depending upon the issues. Individuals band into interest groups that operate on the block, neighborhood, local, state and federal levels.
Historically, even groups that have been initially shouldered out of the competition for influencing the government have sought and sometimes succeeded in wrangling a place for themselves: labor unions in the 1930s, for example, civil rights activists in the 1960s, and gays in the 2000s. While the addition of groups hitherto left out of the political conversation may not assure equal voice in all matters, they can force the conversation to take a new turn.
Railing against “do nothing” government or calling for quick fixes will never accomplish much beyond garnering a headline, grabbing a vote, or selling a book. Government response may indeed be slow, but the complex problems of a vast nation rarely lend themselves to quick fixes. Inaction or indecisiveness by the government often means a state of equilibrium among interest groups so that no one of them can push through its agenda. Annoying, yes, but deadlocks are always temporary, and will be broken – count on it! — perhaps by new elections, unanticipated events, the entry of a new interest group, or realignment of the old ones. The give and take of interest group pluralism is erratic, plodding, and tedious, but at the same time it virtually assures the unlikelihood of mass upheaval – such as class warfare or revolution. The slowness of the system, however infuriating, maintains its stability.
The reality of how American politics operates need not lead to pessimism. True, the system is far from perfect. Some groups have disproportionate influence, while others — mostly the poor — have little or none. Still, the facts are that over the course of American history there have been legislative successes, including ones that have improved the situation of those who are most helpless: the establishment of minimum wages, for instance, and of public schools, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and more.
Clearly the history of special interest government in America is not a monolithic story of unrelieved failure in dealing with serious problems faced by the American people. In their ever-changing way, the American people ARE those special interests. “We the people” – one vote, letter, protest, fundraiser at a time — contribute to the evolution of the American political system every day. “We the people” carry it forward into the future.
SOME SOURCES AND RESOURCES
James Paterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watercate to Bush v. Gore, Oxford University Press, 2005.
Robert Dahl, How Democratic Is the Constitution? 2nd edition, Yale University Press, 2002.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles of American History, Houghton Mifflin, 1986.
Caroline Kennedy, Profiles in Courage for Our Time, Hyperion, 2002
The following short piece is adapted from a guest editorial for the Lancaster, PA, Sunday News “In My Opinion” column. It appeared on December 18, 2011.
WE CAN SURVIVE – AND CONTROL — POLITICAL GRIDLOCK
by Harvey Asher, Ph.D.
Although partisan combat brought the government to the brink of shutdown on four occasions, political gridlock is too strong a term to describe the Congresses in session during the Obama presidency. They agreed to an $800 billion economic stimulus package and a massive restructuring of the health care system. They approved free trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia, and Panama. Other legislation made college loan repayment more manageable, provided new consumer protections for credit card users, and eased the way for women to challenge pay discrimination. Congress also voted for tax incentives for businesses to hire additional workers, tax credits for first time home owners, and temporary reductions in Social Security taxes. However reluctantly, they raised the debt ceiling.
Good things can be accomplished by even less-than-stellar politicos.
Why, then, according to the latest Gallop Poll, does the approval rating of that august body linger in the single digits? Part of the answer is that public opinion is divided about the wisdom of the above-cited legislation. For example, many consider the economic stimulus package to be an unwarranted bailout for the very financial institutions responsible for the current economic mess in the first place. There is strong feeling that they should have been allowed to fail and the perpetrators held accountable.
But the main reason for describing a Washington stalled in gridlock is the failure of Congress to act decisively on deficit reduction, to reign in the costs of major entitlement programs, or to enact broad tax reforms.
Contributing to public disillusionment is the accusatory and hostile atmosphere in which negotiations between the two parties take place. Last minute compromises grudgingly agreed to, name calling, and strident language create the impression that reelection prospects rather than public interest predominate in House and Senate deliberation, the system is dysfunctional, nothing is getting done, and – in extremis – the death of American democracy is imminent. Drawn-out recriminations by partisans from both parties over who is to blame for the current stalemate reinforce the notion that today’s politicians are a breed apart from earlier legislators, more selfish and parochial.
Truth be told, nasty and vindictive partisan politics is nothing new, and has not mortally wounded the ability of our democracy to carry on. Today’s alleged gridlock can hardly compare to the post Civil War decades of weak presidents, with neither party able to gain much traction because of close elections. Rarely were the presidency and Congress in the hands of a single party. Sectional issues predominated, based on still unresolved problems with Reconstruction. The result was inaction on the big issues of the day: tariffs, currency reform, and government regulation of business excesses. After 30 years remarkable for inaction, the stalemate was finally broken by the 1896 victory of William McKinley and subsequent Republican domination over the next decade.
We have survived other do little or do nothing Congresses, among them the 80th, called into special session by Harry Truman and against which he launched fiery partisan attacks. His 1948 “give’ em hell campaign” excoriated Congressional Republicans for refusing to expand Social Security, support higher minimum wages, endorse more progressive taxation, and for gutting efforts to establish a national health care system.
In 1995, Congressional stalemate resulted in the government shutting down twice.
Clearly, when a single party has a small majority in Congress, or the President and congressional majority come from opposing parties, legislation is slow and more limited in scope. Textbook descriptions of how our checks and balances system operates – smoothly and cooperatively – omit the reality that American democracy has mostly been a slow, messy, painful affair. Even in a best case scenario when one party holds the presidency and an overwhelming majority in Congress, success for major legislation is by no means assured. Three years passed between Franklin Roosevelt’s pledge to initiate a social security program and the arrival of the final bill, a watered down version excluding from coverage domestic workers and farm laborers.
Low ratings, cajoling, or appeals to logic will not cause obstructionists to embrace compromise and end gridlock. Nor can either extreme out shout the other. Imagine, instead, a vast, coast-to-coast demonstration of citizens calmly marching toward the polls on election day, armed with facts and such sentiments as “Slow and steady wins the race!” and “Two steps forward, one step back is still progress!” and “Moderation in all things, including elected officials!” The only way to control gridlock is to vote the rascals out of office, and not let frustration and anger lead to ballots cast for a new batch of ideologues perched far out in right or left field. Avoiding such foolishness increases the likelihood of a majority who can work together to get things done.
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It’s become fashionable over the past two decades for those who write about American politics to categorize our system as dysfunctional. Right- and left-wing authors differ over whom to blame, but their urgent tones are remarkably similar. A tiny sampling: Sean Hannity, Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism (2005); James Carville and Paul Begala, Take It Back: A Battle Plan for Democratic Victory (2006); John Dean, Broken Government; How Republicans Destroyed the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches (2007); and Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (2011).
Bookstores might do well to house these and similar titles in an America the Unbeautiful section. So pervasive is present pessimistic thinking that Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines politics as “political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices” alongside the usual “the art or science of government.” To much of the media, dishonest practices high and low now constitute the new political norm rather than abuse.
The gloomiest political analysts project the continuation or worsening of the current mess into a future that inevitably bodes the death of American democracy. Small wonder, then, that so many Americans think the self-correcting mechanisms and institutions of our government no longer work. Traditional safeguards appear to be hopelessly out of whack to deal with today’s crises: Fair competition among political parties, scrutiny by the press and reform critics, tensions in the coequal branches of government, and the checks and balances imposed by law and the Constitution seem to be falling by the wayside in a tidal wave of rancor. A poll released in the fall of 2011 found that only 9% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing, reflecting public frustration with the failure to address major problems — from lack of jobs to soaring deficits, and from assuring the financial integrity of Social Security to lessening income gaps between rich and poor.
Doubt and consternation are natural reactions when the entire government seems to be running amok. In the spring of 2011, for instance, only at the eleventh hour did Congress agree on budget cuts and a raised debt ceiling to keep the government from shutting down. A normally simple maneuver, this one occurred only after noisy and drawn-out recriminations by both parties, despite overwhelming public clamor for a deal.
Heaving great sighs, modern doom-predictors decry “politics as usual,” as if that phrase explained what ails our nation these days and why we’re headed toward the cliff. But politics has always been politics, and “as usual” is a clear confirmation of that fact. Doubt and consternation can be tempered by stepping back for a perspective that takes in more than the here and now.
Complaints about “politics as usual” generally fall into one of three categories:
1. Politicians behaving badly.
2. Politicians treating one another badly.
3. Politicians making it impossible to get anything done.
But is any of this new?
Politicians behaving badly. This form of “politics as usual” is as American as apple pie. Chesapeake planters of the late eighteenth century assured their re-election by treating the electorate to drinks before and after they cast their ballots. The spoils system that developed gradually in the first half of the 19th century saw victorious politicians awarding jobs and appointments to party supporters, with little regard for qualifications. Political machines and their corrupt bosses have a long history of flourishing in America’s largest cities. Lyndon Johnson, as majority leader of the Senate, dominated that body by placating, wooing, cajoling, arm twisting, and flattering potential allies like no one before or since.
Twenty-first century public embarrassments are easily matched by past examples. In the 18th century, Alexander Hamilton carried on an adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds, a part-time prostitute, and was blackmailed by her husband. In the 19th century, President Grover Cleveland ‘fessed up to fathering an illegitimate child, thus inspiring the popular chant, “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!” The 20th century brought us the peccadilloes of Nelson Rockefeller, John Kennedy, Gary Hart, and . . . no need to go on, but we could. The 21st century has added only the novelty of cell phone pornography and sexting to this very long story.
Politicians treating one another badly. Presidents and candidates, including the Founders, were known to sling mud at their rivals and enemies in ways that make today’s diatribes seem tame:
- John Adams about George Washington: “That Washington was not a scholar is certain. That he is too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station is equally beyond dispute.”
- Benjamin Franklin about John Adams: “He is always honest, sometimes great, but often mad.”
- Arthur Lee about Benjamin Franklin: “There never existed I think a man more meanly envious and selfish than Dr. Franklin.”
- Fisher Ames about John Hancock: “Hancock thought himself a Jupiter, and filled his Olympus with buffoons, sots, and blockheads.”
- John Quincy Adams about Andrew Jackson: “A barbarian who cannot write a sentence of grammar and can hardly spell his name.”
- Andrew Jackson about William Henry Harrison: “Our President Imbecile in Chief.”
- Teddy Roosevelt about John Tyler: “A politician of monumental littleness.”
- Ulysses Grant about Andrew Johnson: “He is such an infernal liar.”
- Woodrow Wilson about Ulysses Grant: “He combined great gifts with great mediocrity,” and on Chester Arthur: “A non-entity with side whiskers.”
The elections of 1796 and 1800 were extremely nasty contests, characterized by vituperative newspaper editorials, scathing leaflets, and character assassinations written and distributed by the rival camps. Jefferson’s Federalist opponent portrayed him as a drunkard and an enemy of religion, and broached the scandalous possibility that he’d fathered his slave Sally Hemming’s children. The Federalist Connecticut Courant predicted that Jefferson’s victory would lead to a society in which murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest would be openly taught and practiced.
Sound familiar?
For his part, Jefferson hired hatchet man James Callender, who wrote during the 1800 campaign that Adams was mentally deranged, intended to have himself crowned an American monarch, and planned to appoint his son John Quincy Adams as his successor to the presidency. Democratic-Republicans falsely asserted that while serving as ambassador to Russia, Adams procured mistresses for himself and his cohorts.
Former Vice President Aaron Burr and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton fought a duel on July 11, 1804. Hamilton was mortally wounded. Southern Senator John Randall and Secretary of State Henry Clay also fought a duel. Fortunately, neither participant was hurt. And in the summer of 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina accosted Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner at his desk, beating him unconscious with a cane for impugning Brooks’s uncle’s honor. A level of bad behavior worthy of the Jerry Springer Show!
Politicians making it impossible to get things done. Greater civility among political rivals might be nice, but the fact remains that when parties disagree on fundamentals, fur flies and significant cooperation is highly unlikely. The January 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords inTuscon, Arizona, did not significantly change the way business was done on the Hill, though the horrific event exposed the vulnerability of all representatives. The symbolic crossing of aisles by some Republicans and Democrats to sit alongside one another for the President’s State of the Union address soon afterward had no long-term effect on (nasty) politics as usual.
Politicians have always been human and therefore prone to human failings. American politics has always been about acquiring power to influence the behavior of others – to make them do things or to prevent them from acting freely. American politicians have always been driven by personal ambition that makes them willing to test the boundaries of permissible behavior for winning and holding on to office.
And yet good things – even great things – have gotten done in the past, are getting done now, and will continue to get done. Eighteenth century personal animosities did not halt the creation of the United States of America. During the Progressive Era of the 1890s -1920s, legislation passed that democratized the political process through initiative, recall, referendum, and the direct election of Senators. In the aftermath of World War I, a constitutional amendment gave women the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 opened up new possibilities for African-American and other minority voters. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 made a profound difference in many lives.
Disillusionment about the American political scene traditionally ebbs and flows as the economy improves or declines, and according to whether the nation is at peace or in wars going poorly. Dire prophecies about the future of American politics – and the fate of our democracy — miss the mark because they are based on unrealistic interpretations about how the national government has operated since it came into existence.
Gloom and doom are by no means something new. According to James Madison, “. . . all men having power ought to be mistrusted.” Thomas Jefferson, toward the end of his life, was extremely pessimistic about the long-term viability of the American nation he helped create. In a letter to John Holmes, a Congressman from Massachusetts, he said, “I regret I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 . . . is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, in that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it.” Madison, again, writing in 1829, gave the great American experiment only a hundred more years. “Remember,” he said, “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
We’re now well into our third century.
Modern predictors of gloom and doom ignore the past and play on our current worst fears — sometimes out of conviction; often as a means toward self-serving ends. Fear garners votes. Fear sells books. Again, nothing new. Writing in the first half of the 20th century, H.L. Mencken declared, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The whole aim? No. Not all of our concerns are imaginary. Those that are genuine are worth calm and close examination, but history assures us, to paraphrase our own Mark Twain, that the reports of democracy’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
There is no sharp break between the politics of yesterday and today or between the politicians of yesterday and today. Politics as usual has always been the only kind possible for the American system of governance. It does not rule out good things being accomplished by even less-than-stellar politicians who become legislators, as long as they are held accountable by an informed electorate.
SOME SOURCES AND RESOURCES
In addition to the titles mentioned in the first paragraph above –
The American National Elections Study at http://www.umich.edu/~nes/ne3s_guide/toptable/tab5
Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996)
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Once upon a time, Americans were soft spoken, polite, and well-informed. They tucked their shirts in before they went outside, and donned hats and gloves before venturing into town. They kept a civil tongue in their heads. They treated their teachers, elders, and one another with respect. They attended lectures, concerts and the theater. They read newspapers, magazines, and books. And they taught their children that George Washington never told a lie.
These days, restaurants, street corners, cars, trains, buses, and airports are used as individual broadcasting stations from which the chronically connected blast forth the banality of their daily existence, often punctuated with profanities. When polled, most people say they consider this behavior rude – but not in the case of their own conversations. Boorish narcissism seems to have reached new heights.
Or is it that people have always been rude, but cellphone conversations make their lack of consideration for others more obvious? We’ve had sidewalk spitters as long as we’ve had sidewalks. The young used to haul boom boxes around instead of listening to iPods. Phone rudeness is nothing new. People who remember party lines recall neighbors who listened in on private calls as if they were radio shows.
No, we’re assured by experts, things are definitely getting worse. Intellectuals, academicians, and writers bemoan the fast-deteriorating life of the mind in American culture and the corresponding coarsening of our society. They find signs of decay everywhere: public indifference towards learning, fixation on the trivial, unawareness of—and even pride in—ignorance. Citizens, they claim, cannot distinguish among rumors, lies, propaganda, and facts. “For all too many Americans who dozed through American History 101,” claims Kenneth David in Don’t Know Much About History,” the Mayflower Compact might as well be a small car . . . Reconstruction has something to do with silicone implants.”
Naysayers frequently contrast twenty-first-century Americans with the “Greatest Generation,” selfless men and women who won World War II and then built a prosperous postwar society without boasting of their achievements and sacrifices. Praise for the heroes and hard workers of that time is richly deserved.
But were the good old days really that good? If Washington never even chopped down that cherry tree (and he didn’t), how does that make today look by comparison?
Let’s see.
Today’s culture critics are hardly the first to complain about the atrophy of American intellectual life, its philistine culture, the loss of its moral underpinnings, and the vacuity of middle-class life. What makes them unique is that they are the first of their kind to declare hopelessness about the situation ever changing for the better.
In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), a Frenchman named Jean de Crevecoeur defined an American as he “who leaving behind him all prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.” He applauded Americans’ lack of reverence for the classical education received by the antidemocratic European aristocracy. De Crevecoeur later became a U.S. citizen.
Transcendentalists in the 1830s and 1840s lambasted the philistinism that came in the wake of commercial and industrial development. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s goal in promoting the cultivation of the mind and the divine spark within was to offset the materialism he noted all around him. The same could be said of his contemporary and disciple Henry David Thoreau and the latter’s Walden Pond musings: “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”
French traveler and observer Alexis de Tocqueville worried in Democracy in America (1848) that social and cultural life in the United States was dull, insipid, and less brilliant than Europe’s. Its citizens did not “recognize signs of incontestable greatness, or the superiority of their fellows,” and “needed no books to teach them philosophic methods, having found it in themselves.” Equality among citizens “distracted them from speculative inquiries” into greater minds than their own and led them to the belief that one man’s opinion was as good as another’s.
For historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the closing of the frontier in the 1890s posed a threat to toughness, resourcefulness, and individuality, quintessential qualities of the pioneers who built American democracy. It was a place where a good map was worth a thousand books, and refined tenderfoots need not apply. In the words of Abraham Lincoln’s cousin Dennis Hanks, “Looks didn’t count in them days, no how. It was strength an’ work an’ daredevil.”
Implicit in criticisms of the ways things are is nostalgia for the way things were. Contemporary social critic Susan Jacoby misses the middlebrow culture she grew up in, a culture that ran from the mid-nineteenth century through the early 1960s, and presumably offered a portal to something more elevated – high culture. This was a time when arbiters of taste—such as the intellectual Dwight Macdonald—promoted reading the great books of the Western world as a means toward self-improvement. Macdonald distinguished between high culture and mass culture, sometimes referred to as “popular culture.” In an essay published in 1953 called “A Theory of Mass Culture,” he disdained all art, music, and literature aimed at average people, comparing Life Magazine, pop music, Norman Rockwell’s paintings, and Mickey Spillane mysteries to chewing gum.
Susan Jacoby blames the current incurable age of unreason to intertwined ignorance and anti-rationalism “aggressively promoted by everyone, from politicians to media executives.” A mutant and lethal virus keeps “a public in thrall to the serpent promising effortless enjoyment from the fruit of the tree of infotainment.” The pervasiveness of the assault against reason means “the nation’s memory and attention span may have already sustained so much damage that they cannot be revived by the best efforts of America’s best minds.”
The good old days, when middlebrow aspirations to high culture reigned, were also the height of the McCarthy witch hunts against communists, who had supposedly infiltrated the government and other basic American institutions. Hollywood screenwriters and directors, along with university professors, authors, playwrights, and others, were subjected to harassment and forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. They were accused, often falsely, of left-leaning political flirtations in their youth or of assisting communists or of being communist party members themselves. On pain of being blacklisted and barred from employment, they were goaded to name names of other “disloyal Americans” they knew or associated with. Reputations were destroyed, along with hundreds of careers whether or not those called to testify had any connection to communism. “Dangerous” books were purged from schools, public libraries, and American embassies
These were also times when the strict conformity of “organization men” in “grey flannel suits,” sexism, infidelity, ruthlessness, and (not surprisingly) alcoholism pervaded corporate culture (as superbly shown in the TV series Mad Men). Suburban man sacrificed individuality to a job he hated to buy a more expensive house for his family and a better brand of gin. Young women who attended college were encouraged to earn their “MRS” degrees – that is, find educated husbands with greater earning power – and went on to become coffee klatch-attending wives on tranquilizers and antidepressants.
Memories are ever-shifting clouds, and they tend to be shaded by the emotions they evoke, including the ardor of youth, hope and idealism. The past seems better simply because we were younger then – not only healthier, with more to look forward to, but shielded from the troubles fomenting around us. Reminiscences may say more about the age of those doing the recalling than the unadorned reality of the events themselves.
It’s a quintessential part of the make-up of American intellectuals, academicians, and writers to bemoan the low level of our culture. It has always been their role to play. It’s true that we Americans hang onto the commoner’s fascination with royalty, especially pretty princesses. It’s true that we have an on-going tradition of eating beans from a can and farting around the campfire. And, yes, those loud, inane, and profane cellphone conversations ARE annoying. As John Adams once wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “Our American chivalry is the worst in the world. It has no laws, no bounds, no definitions, it seems to be all a caprice.”
But there’s no need to mourn the entirety of our American culture as if it suddenly became lost for all eternity. Good magazines, newspapers, and books are still being read. We can download almost every great book ever written and much more from the Internet for free – and millions of us are doing that. We attend lectures, concerts, and theater in record numbers. National Public Radio and even “the vast wasteland” of television offer us a bevy of thoughtful programming. Does this sound like the end of civilization?
And we still get dressed up to go out on the town. When we feel like it and in whatever manner we choose. We may go to the opera in a tux or in jeans. That’s our American way. Come on, were the powdered wigs and corsets of old any more sensible than today’s tattoos and six-inch stilettos?
When we lay the not so good parts of the good old days alongside the not so good parts of today, we see both in a new perspective. It may not always be a bright “morning in America,” but neither is it always just another cloudy day.
SOME SOURCES AND RESOURCES
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1848)
Richard Hofstadler, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962)
Lynn Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door (2005)
Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (2008)
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Daily reports in print, on television, and over the Internet make it easy to conclude that the United States is going to hell in a handbasket. The economy is in tatters. Race relations remain strained despite the election of the first African-American president. Sexual escapades flood the media. Public schools perform poorly, and turn out incompetent students. Communication technology has morphed into a Frankenstein monster. And if all that weren’t enough – and there is more! — deep flaws have developed in our national character. Our culture reflects a lack of good taste. Intellectual pursuits are viewed with suspicion and resentment. Shallowness and selfishness dominate the sentiments and beliefs of the majority. The government is broken.
Critics on both the Left and Right consider ours the worst of times in American history. These modern-day Cassandras and Nostradamuses lay doom-laden bets on the when of America’s demise. They describe a funeral procession already underway, although the soon-to-be-deceased (America as we knew it) remains unaware of its imminent burial.
Had enough?
America: The Owners’ Manual shows how apocalyptic scenarios simplify complex situations. They’re meant to alarm, convince, and convert, not to illuminate. American life is not a binary affair; notions of America the Blighted or America the Beautiful do little to help us understand America the Real.
The many problems besieging the United States today need to be evaluated in the broader and longer contexts out of which the American experience evolved. Doing less makes it impossible to tell whether present difficulties are new, or simply warmed-over versions of the same old, same old. Most of the time, the latter is true, giving us evidence that we’ve survived before and we’ll bounce back again.
America: The Owner’s Manual is all about perspective. That’s the tool needed to understand the broad contours of American history, aspects of the past that have shaped the present and can guide us through the present and into the future. Only perspective can allow us to distinguish what is real and true, reduce our unfounded fears, and help us move forward with confidence.
America: The Owner’s Manual addresses major developments in economics, politics, foreign policy, and cultural and social issues that have significantly shaped contemporary America. It does so without bias toward the left or the right. Examples come from a wide variety of sources, both academic and popular, to create a full picture of how Americans have lived and dealt with trying situations over time.
This blog is meant to serve at least two audiences. One is adults who care about what’s happening to the country and are feeling anxiety and confusion about it. The second includes teachers of high school through college classes, who may use it to supplement coursework in modern American history, historiography, and contemporary issues.
Moderation might be considered a tough sell in a market driven by cuteness and sensationalism, but moderation is the unique, pervading quality of this blog. Its moderate conclusions will please neither conservatives nor liberals whose work focuses on polarization. Likewise, its conclusions will disappoint those who see a United States forever basking in sunlight. The no-nonsense, golden mean approach of America: The Owner’s Manual is so NOT radical, it stands a good chance of becoming the new norm for people tired of endless shock and awe.
The Author
After receiving his doctorate from Indiana University, Harvey Asher taught a variety of courses in history and interdisciplinary studies for thirty-five years at Drury University, a liberal arts school in Springfield, Missouri. His articles on themes in Russian history, American history, and the Holocaust have appeared in the Russian Review, Kritika, the Journal of Genocide Research, the Russian Dictionary, the SHARF Newsletter, Federalism in America: An Encyclopedia, and Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust. He is also the author of The Drury Story Continues, an informal but thorough history of the school.
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