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CHAPTER 1

Political Culture

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. From The Liberal Tradition in America:

An Interpretation of American Political ThoughtSince the Revolution. .

LOUIS HARTZ

.. -Political culture refers to the orientation of citizens toward the political system. and toward themselves as actors in it. This includes the basic values, beliefs,at-

titudes, predispositions, and expectations that citizens bring to political life..-Given the great diversity of the American population, one might expect a simi-larly diverse array of thought within political culture, with rival sets of politicalvalues challenging each other. In his classic and influential work, Louis Hartzargues that in fact there is broad agreement in the United Sta.tes around a set ofpolitical beliefs.Hartz refers to this as the "liberal tradition"; the terms "liberolconsensus" and ':4.merici;mCreed" have also been used. "Liberali, here means a

focus on the individual and minimizing government intervention in daily life.Within the liberal tradition, the values of equality, private property; liberty, indi-vidualism, protection of religious freedom, and democracy are especially power-ful. There is certainly debate over what these tenns mean or how much toemphasize one versus ano~her, and these clashes animate party politics, but wedo not see successful political movements in the United States that directly chal-lenge these values. On the contrary, most movements seek to show how their be-

. liefs -and principles are highly consistent with these basic American values.r Hartz argues that it is the nature of American history that led to this unusual

uniformity. Not having had a feudal stage, Americans also did not witness. therevolutionary stages and ideologies thnt challenged feudalism in Europe. AsHartz puts it; "no feudalism, no socialism." This historical path does presentsome problems, in Hartz's view. Americans view liberalism as natural, as obvi-ous. Indeed, to s01neextent, we are hardly aware of it as an ideology because it

4, LOUIS HARTZ

has beenunchallenged.To Hartz, writing in the 19505, this sometimesblindsAmericans to.policy alternatives, heightensour fears of social disharmonyand70reign" ideas,and makesit hardfor Americans to understand othersocietieswherea liberal tradition is not sodominant. . . .

'1. America and Europe

The analysis which this book contains is based on what might be calledthe storybook truth about American history: that America was settled

by men who fled from the feudal and clerical oppressions of the OldWorld. If there is anything in this view, as old as the national folklore it-

. self, then the outstanding thing about the American community in West-ern history ought to be the non-existence of those oppressions, or sincethe reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that theAmerican community is a liberal community. We are confronted ···with .

· .. · America skipping the feudal stage of history" .. "Feudalism" referstechnically to the institutions of the medieval era, and it is well known

. that aspects of the decadent feudalism of the iater period, such as primo-geniture, entail, and quitrents, were present in America even in the eigh-

. teenth century. "Liberalism" is an even vaguer term, clouded as it is byall sorts of modem social reform connotations, and even when one insistson using it in the classic Lockian sense, as I shall irisist here, there are as-

. peets of our original life in the pUritan colonies and the South which .

~dly fit its meaning.1 But these are the liabilities of any large general-ization,..danger points but not insuperable barnert. What in the end ismore interesting is the curious failure of American historians, after re-

. peating endlessly that America was grounded in escape from the Euro-pean past, to interpret our history in the light of that fact: .....

.. ..

. 2. "NaturalLiberalism"; TheFrameofMindOne of the central characteristics of a nonfeudal society is that it"lacks agenuine revolutionary tradition, the tradition which in Europe has beenlinked with the Puritan and French revolutions: that it is "born free," asTocqueville said. And this being the case, it lackS also a tradition of reac-tion" .. ... Its liberalism is .. .. .. a "natural" phenomenon. But the matter iscuriously broader than this, for a society which begins with Locke, andthus transforms him, stays with Locke, by virtue of an absolute and irra-

. tional attachment it develops for him, and becomes as indifferent to thechallenge of socialism in the later era as it was unfamiliar with the her-itage of feudalism in the earlier one. It has within it, as it were, a kind ofself-completing mech~m, which insures the .universality of the liberalidea. · ." .. It is not. accidental that AmeriCa which has uniquely lacked afeudal tradition has uniquely lacked .alSoa socialist tradition. The hidden

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From TheLiberal Tradition in America 5

. origin of socialist thought everywhere in the West Is to be found in. thefeudal ethos. It .. It. .' .

America has presented the world with the peculiar phenomenon, notof a frustrated middle class, but of a "frustrated aristocracy"-of men,Aristotelian-like, trying to break out of the egalitarian confines of middle-class life but suffering .guilt and failure in the process. The South beforethe Civil War is the case par excellence of this, though New England ofcourse exemplifies it also. It .. It The Southerners were thrown into fan-tastic contradictions by their iconoclastic conservatism, by what I havecalled the "Reactionary Enlightenment," and after the Civil War for goodhistorical reasons they fell quickly into oblivion. The South, as JohnCrowe Ransom has said, has been the part of America closest to OldWorld Europe, but it has never really been Europe. It has been an alien

. child in a liberal family, tortured and confused, driven to a fantasy lifewhich, instead of disproving the power of Locke in America,. portrays-

. more poignantly than anything else the tyranny he has had... .. .. Here we have one of the great and neglected relationships in

American history: the common fecklessness of the Southern "feudalists"and the modem socialists. It is not accidental, but something rooted in

. the logic of all of Western history, that they should fail alike to leave adent in the American liberal intelligence. .. .. .. Socialism arises not only to ~

fight capitalism but remnants of feudalism itself, so that the failure of theSouthern [feuda,lists], in addition to setting the pattern for the failure ofthe later Marxists, robbed them in the process (jf a normal gro~d (or -growth... It It . '. .. .

Surely, then, it is a remarkable force: this fixed, dogmatic liberalism ofa liberal way of life. It is the secret root from which have sprung many ofthe most puzzling of American cultural phenomena. Take the unuSual .

power of .the Supreme Court and the cult of constitution worship onwhich it rests. Federal factors apart, judicial review as.it has worked inAmerica would be inconceivable without the national acceptance of the .

Lockian creed, ultimately enshrined in the Constitution, since the re-moval of high policy to the realm of adjudication implies a prior recogni-tion of the principles to be legally interpreted.. It .. It If in England amarvelous organic cohesion has held together the feudal, liberal, and so-cialist ideas, it would still be un~able there that the largest issues ofpublic policy should be put before nine Talmudic judges examining a sin-gle text. But this is merely another way of saying that law has flourishedon the corpse of philosophy in America, for the settlement of the ultimate

. moral question is the end of speculation upon it. Pragmatism, interest-ingly enough America's great contribution to the philosophic tradition,does not alter this, since it feeds itself on the Lockian settlement. It is onlywhen you take your ethics for granted that all problems emerge as prob-lems of technique. Not that this is,a bar in America to institutional inno-

)

6.. Lo\ )IARTZ-vations of highly non-Lockian kind. Indeed, as the New Deal shows,when you simply "solve problems" on the basis of a submerged and ab-solute liberal faith, you can depart from Locke with a kind of inventivefreedom that European Liberal reformers and even European socialists,dominated by ideological systems, cannot duplicate. .. .. .. .

Here is a Lockian doctrine which in the West as a whole is the symbolof rationalism, yet m America the devotion to it has been so irrationalthat it has not even been recognized for what it is: liberalism. There hasnever been a "liberal movement" or a real "liberal party" in America: wehave only had the American Way of Life, a nationalist articulation ofLocke which usually does not know that Locke himself is involved; andwe did not even get that until after the Civil War when the Whigs of thenation, deserting the Hamiltonian tradition, saw the capital that could bemade out of it. This is why even critics who have noticed America'smoral unity have usually missed its substance. Ironically, '~liberalism" isa stranger in the land of its greatest realization and fulfillment. But this isnot all. Here is a doctrine which everywhere in the West has been a glori-ous symbol of individual liberty, yet in America its compulsive powerhas been so great that it has posed a threat to libertyitself. .

... I believe that this is the basic ethical problemof a liberalsociety:notthe danger of the majority which has been its conscious fear,but the dan-gE~tof unanimity, which has slumbered unconsCiously behind it: the"tyranny of opinion" that Tocqueville saw unfolding as even the patheticsocial.distinctionsof the Federalist era collapsed before his eyes. But inrecent thnes this manifestation of irrational Locki1nism, or of "American-ism," to use a favorite term of the American Legion, .. .. .. has neitherslumbered nor been unconscious. It has been very much awake in a redscare hysteria which.no other nation in the West has really been able tounderstand. And this suggests a very significant principle: that when a.liberal community faces military and ideological pressure from without ittransforms eccentricity into sin, and the irritating figure of the bourgeoisgossip flowers into the frightening figure of an A. Mitchell Palmer or aSenator McCarthy. .. .. .. . .. . .

The decisive domestic issue of our time may well lie in the counter re-sources a liberal society can muster against. this deep .and unwrittentyrannical compulsion it contains. They exist. Given the individualistnature of the Lockian doctrine, there is always a logical impulse. withinit to transcend the very conformitarian spirit it breeds in a Lockian so-.ciety .. .. ". . . .

But the_most powerful force working to shatter the American abso-lutism is, paradoxically enough, the very international involvementwhich tensifies it. This involvement is complex in its implications. If inthe context of the Russian Revolution it elicits a domestic redscare, in thecontext of diplomacy it elicits an impulse to impose Locke everywhere... .. .. Thus to say that world politics shatters '~ericanism" at the mo-.

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From The Liberal Tradition.~ )merica 7

ment it intensifies it is to say a lot: it is to say that the basic horizons of thenation both at home and abroad are drastically widened by it. .. .. ..

[W]hen has the nation appreciated more keenly the limits of its own cul-tural pattern as applied to the rest of the world? .. .. .. [W]henhas themeaning of civil liberties been more ardently understood than now? ." .. ..The outcome of the battle between intensified "Americanism" and newenligntenment is still an open question.

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3. The Dynamics of a Liberal Society

So far I have spoken of natural liberalism as a psychological whole, em-bracing the rtaq6n and inspiring unanimous decisions. We must not as-sume, however, that this is to obscure or to minimize the nature of theinternal conflicts which have characterized American political life,. ..

What we learn from the concept of a liberal society, lacking feudaiismand therefore socialism and governed by an irrational Lockianisrri, is thatthe domestic struggles of such a society have all been projected with thesetting of Western liberal alignmenh;;" .

.. .. ..

That soCiety has been a triumph for the liberal idea, but we must notassume that this ideological victory was not helped forward by the mag-nificent material setting it found in the New World. The agrar~a.nandproletarian strands of the American democratic personality, which inSome sense typify the whole of American uniqueness, reveal a remark-able collusion between Locke and the New World. Had it been merely the

. liberal spirit alone which inspired the American farmer to become capi-. talistically oriented, to repudiate save for a few early remnants the villageorganization: of Europe, to produce for a market and even to enter capi-talist occupations on the side such as logging and railroad building, thenthe difficulties he encountered would have been greater than they were.But where land was abundaJ:lt and the voyage to the New World itself aclaim to independence, the spirit which repudiated peasantry and ten.:.antry flourished with remarkable ease. Similarly, had it merely been anaspect of irrational Lockianism which inspired the.American worker to .think in terms of the capitalist setup, the task would have been harderthan it was. . .. . .

JiJutsocial fluidity was peculiar\y fortified by the riches of a rich land, .

so that there was no small amount of meaning to Lmcoln's claim in 1861that the American laborer, instead of "being fixed to that condition for.life," works for "awhile," then "saves," then "hires another beginner" ashe himself becomes an entrepreneur. And even when factory industJ;'jal-ism gained sway after the Civil War, and the old artisan and cottage-a:i1d-

8 LOUIS HARTZ

mill mentality was definitely gone, it was still a Lockian idea fortified bymaterial resources which inspired the triumph of the job mentality ofGompers rather than the class mentality of the European worker. The

. "petit-bourgeois" giant of America, though ultimately a triumph for theliberal idea, could hardly have chosen a better material setting in which .to flourish. . .

It It It

. One cannot say of the liberal society analysis that by concentrating onnational unities it rules out the meaning of domestic conflict. Actually itdiscovers that meaning It It It. The argument over whether we should"stress" solidarity or conflict in American politics misleads us by advanc-

.ing.a ~alseset.of alternatives. .

It It It

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Do you agree with Hartz tha~Americans have a hard time under-standing other societies because of ideological uniformity in the

. United States? . . . .

2. Do you think Hartz is correct in saying that Americans are in agree-ment on the values of the liberal tradition? Are there parts of~erican histo,ry or society today that maj(e ~ou doubt his thesis?

3. Without limiting yourselt to Hartz's observations, what do you'. think might be some of the advantages and disadvantages of a high

degree of agreement on basic values for American society and poli-tics? . . .

NOTES

1. Ed.note: "Lockian" refers to John Locke, a British political theorist. Locke'sideas of individualism, liberty,property rights, and limited governmentwereamong thosethat influencedpoliticalleaders at the l:in1eof theAmericanRevolu-tion. .

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2

From The Creation of the American Republic,.. 1776-1787

GORDON S. WOOD

In the 1960s, agroup of historians took issue with tI,edepiction ofAmerican so-

ciety asfundamentally and uniformly liberal. PerllapsAmerican society in thetwentieth century Ulasdominated by tile liberal tradition, Ilistorianssuch asGordon Wood argued, bllt in tile colollial alld revolutionary period, it tVasclassi-cal republicanism that IIlOst sl/flped public tllought aboutpolitics.The liberalconsensusemphasizesthe primacy of the individual ill society; classical republi-canismdrawsindividuals'attentiontosocietyand tile community.A contempo-rary termfor this approacllis "commnlllllitarianism."Toclassicalrepublicans,individuals are not self-made-society makes individuals wlmt they are andindividuals 'owe something to society ill return. Tile classicalrepublicanap-proach doesn't disagreethat illdividuals have personalresponsibilityand needto work hard and diligently. It tVould,however,suggest that the point. of selfimprovement is to better serve ti,e community and society. Wood notes tlmt inthis view,politicsis not primarilyaboutachievingyour self-interest.Rntller,the

focus is on civic duty. Participation is expected, for the social good. Inditlidualsare to be motivated not by self-interes( but by moralityand virtue. Although .

Woodargueselsewherethat classicalrepublicanismfailed in the 1780sand IImdethe way for liberal politics to become dominant and embraced by the COIIStitll-tion, other historians suggest that the 'classical republican ideals continued to in-fluence American politics throllgh various reform movements over the course ofu.s. history. . .'

.. .. II'

The PublicGood

The sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the wholeformed the essence of republicanism and comprehended for Americansthe idealistic goal of their Revolution. From this goal flowed all of theAmericans' exhortatory literature and all that made their ideology trulyrevolutionary. This republican ideology both presumed and helped shapethe Americans' conception of the way their society and politics should bestructured and operated-a vision so divorced from the realities of Amer-ican society, so contrary to the previous century of American experience,

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. 10' G?RDr l' WOOD

that it alone was enough to make the Revolution one of the great utopianmovements of American history. By 1776the Revolution came to repre-sent a final attempt, perhaps-given the nature of American society-even a desperate attempt, by many Americans to realize the traditionalCommonwealth ideal of a corporate society, in which the common goodwouldbe the onlyobjectiveof government..

.. .. ..

To make the people's welfare-the public good-the exclusive end ofgovernment became for the Americans, as one general put it, their "PolarStar," the central tenet of the Whig faith, shared not only by Hamiltonand Paine.at.opposite ends of the Whig spectrum, but by any Americanbitterly opposed to a system which held "that a Part is greater than it~Whole; or, in other Words, that some Individuals ought to be considered,even to the Destruction of the Community, which they compose." Nophrase except "liberty" was invoked more often by the Revolutionariesthan "the public good." It expressed the colonists' deepest hatreds of theold order and their most visionaryhopesfor the new... ..~

From the logic of belief that "all government. . . is or ought to be, cal-culated for the general good and safety of the community," for which end"the most effectual means that human wisdom hath ever been able to de-vise, is frequently appealing to the body of the people," followed theAmericans' unhesitating adoption of republicanism ~ 1776.The peculiarexcellenceof republican government was that it was "wholly characteris-tical of the purport, matter, or object for which government ought to beinstituted." By definition it had no other end than the welfare of the peo-ple: respublica,the public affairs, or the public good. "The word republic,"said Thomas Paine, "means the publicgood,or the good of the whole, incontradistinction to the despotic-form, which makes the good of the sov-ereign, or of one man, the only object of the government." . .

Since ii1a free government the public good was identical with the peo-ple's welfare, a "matter of COMMONFEELING"and founded on the "COM-MON CONSENT"of the people, the best way of realizing it in the Whigmind was to allow the people a maximum voice in the government."That the great body of the people," as even the Tory William Smith ofPhiladelphia admitted, "can have any interest separate from their coun-try, or (when fairly understood) pursue any other, is not to be imagined;""unless," as John Sullivan said, "we suppose them idiots qr self.murderers." Therefore any government which lacked Ita proper represen-tation of the people" or was in any way even "independent of thepeople" was liable to violate the common good and become tyrannical.Most Whigs had little doubt of the people's honesty or. even of their abil-

. ity to discern what was good for themselves. It was a maxim, declared aNew York patriot, "that whatever may be the particular opinions of Indi-viduals, the bulk of the people, both mean, and think right." Was there

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). FfDm TheCreationof theAmericanRepublic,1776-1787 11

ever any fear, James Burgh had gone so far as to ask, that the peoplemight be "toofree to consult the general good?" Of course even the mostradical English Whigs admitted that the people might sometimes mistaketheir own interest and might often be unable to effect it even when theydid correctly perceive it. Most Americans therefore assumed that the peo-ple, in their representational expression 'of their collective liberty in thehouses of representatives, could not run the whole government. "Liberty,though the most essential requisite in government," Richard Price hadwritten, "is not the only one; wisdom, union, dispatch, secrecy, andvigour are likewise requisite"-qualities best supplied by a magistracyand a senate.

. Yet such governors 'and upper houses, however necessary, must beelectively dependent on the people. Republicanism with its elective mag-istracy would not eliminate the problems of politics and the threat ofpower, but it did promise a new era of stability and cooperation betweenrulers and ruled. .. .. .. For decades, and especially in recent years, theCrown's presence in America had played havoc with the colonists' polit-icallife and was the real source of that factious behavior of which royalofficials had so repeatedly and unjustly accused them. "Every man thathas lived any time.in America, under regal government, knows what fre-quent, and almost continual opposition there is between the country in-terest and those in power." "By keeping clear of British government," theAmericans could at last be rid of those "jars and contentions betweenGovernors and Assemblies." By allowing the people to elect their magis-tracy,' republicanism would work to ''blend the interests of the peopleand their rulers" and thus "put down every animosity among- the peo-ple." In the kind of states where "their governors shall proceedfrom themidstof them" the people could be surer that their interests exclusively wouldbe promoted, and therefore in turn would "pay obedience to .officersproperly appointed" and maintain "no discontents on account of theiradvancement." .

What made the Whig conception of politics and the republican empha-sis on the collective welfare of the people comprehensible was the as-sumption that the people, espedally when set against their rulers, were ahomogeneous body whose "interests when candidly considered are one."Since everyone in the community was linked organically to everyoneelse, what was good for the whole community was ultimately good forall the parts. The people were in fact a single organic piece ('jor God hathso tempered the body that there should be 110Schism in the body, but tltat theMembers should have the same care for one another") with a unitary concernthat was the only legitimate objective of governmental policy.This com- .

mon interest was not, as we might today think of it, simply the sum orconsensus of the particular interests that made up the community. It wasrather. an entity in itself, prior to and distinct from the various private in-terests of groups and individuals. As Samuel Adams said in 1776,para-

12 GORDON S. WOOD '

phrasing Vattel, the state was /fa moral person, having an interest andwill of its own." Becausepolitics was conceived to be not the reconcilingbut the transcending of the different interests of the society in the search

'for the single common good, the republican state necessarily had to besmall in territory and generally similar in interests. Despite sporadic sug-

, gestions in the press for "a simple government" of a strong continentalcongress chosen ''by the people, (not by their representatives)," and unit-ing all the people "in orie great republick," few Americans thought thatsuch an extensive continental republic, as distinct from a league of states,was feasible in 1776-however much they may have differed over the de-sirable strength of the expected confederation.

No one, of course, denied that the community was filled with differ-ent, often clashing combinations of interests. But apart from the basicconflict between governors and people these were not to be dignified bytheir incorporation into formal political theory or into any,serious discus-sion of what ought to be. In light of the assumption that the state was "tobe considered as one moral whole" these interests and parties were re-garded as aberrations or perversions, indeed signs of sickness in the bodypolitic. Although some eighteenth-century thinkers were in, fact begin-ning to perceive the inevitability, even the desirability, of faction in a freestate, most continued to regard division among the people as "both dan-gerous and destructive," arising "from ,false ambition, avarice; or re-venge." Men lost control of their basest passions and w~re unwilling tosacrifice their_immediate desires for the corporate' good. lIence, "partydifferences/' however much they may infect the society,could never ide-ally be admitted into the institutions of government, but "would bedropped at the threshold of the state house." The representatives of thepeople would not act as spokesmen for private and partial interests, butall would be "disinterested men, who could have no interest of their ownto seek," and "would employ their whole time for the public good; thenthere would be but one interest, the good of the people at large."

... ... ..

Yet ironically it was precisely internal discord and conflic.tfor whichrepublics were most widely known. Throughout history "free republicangovernments have been objected to, as if exposed to factions from an ex-

, cessof liberty." But this was because liberty had been misunderstood and. falsely equated with licentiousness or the liberty of man in a state pf na-

ture which was "a state of war, rapine and murder." True liberty was"natural liberty restrained in such manner, as to render society one grl:!at

'family; where everyone must consult his neighbour's happiness,'as weU'as his own." in a republic "each individual gives up all private interestthat is not consistent with the general good, the interest of the whole

body." For the r~blican patriots of. 1776 the commonweal was all-encompassing- Janscendent object with a unique moral worth that

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From TheCreatiQnof theAmericanRepublic,1776-1787 , 13

made partial considerations fade into insignificance. "Let regard be hadonly to the good of the whole" was the constant exhortation by publicists~d clergy.Ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual. "A Citizen,"said Samuel Adams, "owes everything to the Commonwealth." "Everyman in a republic;" declared BenjaminRush, "is public property. His timeand talents-his youth-his manhood-his old age-nay more, life, allbelong to his country." "No man is a true republican," wrote a Pennsyl-

.vanian in 1776,"that will not give up his single voice to that of the pub-li~ ' , .

Individual liberty and the public good were easily reconcilable be-cause the important liberty in the Whig ideology was public or politicalliberty. In 1776the solution to the problems of American politics seemedto rest not so much in emphasizing thl:!private rights of individualsagainst the general will as it did in stressing the public rights of the col-lective people against the supposed privileged interests of their rulers.

, "Civil Liberty," as one colonist put it, was not primarily individual; it was"the freedom of bodies politic, or States." Because, as Josiah Quincy said,the people "as a body" were "never interested to injure themselves," and,were "uniformly desirous of the general welfare,'~ there could be no realsense of conflict between public and personal liberty. Indeed, the pri.,.

, vate liberties of individuals depended upon their collective public lib-erty '_

Thus in the minds of 'most Whigs in 1776individual rights, even thebasic civil liberties that we consider so crucial, possessed little of their'modem theoretical relevance when set against the will of the people. Thisis why, for example, throughout the eighteenth century the Americanscould contend for the broadest freedom of speech againsfthemagistracy,while at the same time punishing with a severe strictness any seditious li- ,

bels against the representatives of the people in the colonial assemblies.Anyone who tried to speak against the interests of the people "should beheld in execration: . . .Every word, that tends, to weaken the hands of thepeople is a crime of devilish dye"; indeed, flit is the unpardonable Sin inpolitics." Thus it was "no Loss of Liberty, that court-minions can complainof, when they are silenced. No man has a right to say a word, which maylame the liberties of his country." .. ' '

... .. ...

Even at the beginning, however, there were some good Whigs who,perceived the inherent conflict between individual liberty and traditionalrepublican theory. Ancient Sparta, William Moore Smith told the mem-bers of the Continental Congress in the spring of 1775,had demonstratedthe problem. Knowing that luxury was the great enemy of republicanism

,and liberty, Lycurgus had sought to avoid the evil by eliminating wealthitself. But in doing so he undermined the very basis leedom. "Heseems not to have reflected that there can be no true libel~ithout secu-

-14 GORDO.J WOOD

rity of property; and where property is secure, industry begets wealth;and wealth is often productive of a train of evils naturally destructive tovirtue and freedom!" "Here, then," said Smith, "is a sad dilemma in pol-itics." If the people "exclude wealth,it must be by regulations intrenchingtoo far upon civil liberty."But if wealth is allowed to flourish, "the syrenluxury" soon follows at its heels and gradually contaminates the wholesociety."What is to be done in this case?" Must the society,"to secure thefirst of blessings, liberty," strangle wealth, the first offspring of liberty, inits birth and thus in effect destroy liberty as well? "Or, is there no properuse of wealth and civil happiness, the genuine descendants of civil liberty, .

without abusing them to the nourishment of luxury and corruption?"Smith, like other Whigs in 1776, thought there was an answer to the

. dilemma in the more enlightened policy and "purer system of religion"of,this modem age-"to regulate the use of w~alth, but not to exclude it."

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. The'Needjor Virtue

Perhaps everyone in the eighteenth century could have agreed that intheory no state was more beautiful than a republic, whose whole objectby definitionwas the good of the people. .. .. .. Thevery greatnessof re-publicanism, its' utter dependence on the people, was at ~ SaI11etime itssource of we-akness. In a republic there was no place f9r fear; there couldbe no sustamedcoercion from above. The state, like no other, rested onthe consent of the governed freely given and not compelled. In a freegovemrnent the laws, as the American clergy never tired of repeating,had to be obeyed by the people for conscience's sake, not for wrath's.

.. .. ..

Ina monarchy each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes. could be restrained by fear or force. In a republic, however, each manmust somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into thegreater good of the whole. This willingness of the individual to sacrificehis private interests for the good of the community~uch patriotism orlove of country-the eighteenth century termed "public virtue." A repub- .

. lie was such a delicate polity precisely because it demanded an extraordi-riary moral character in the people. Every state in ~hich the peopleparticipated needed a degree of virtue; but a republic which rested solelyon the people absolutelyrequired it. .. .. .. The eighteenth-century mindwas thoroughly convinced that a popularly based government "cannotbe supported without Virtue." Only with a public-spirited, self-sacrificingpeople could the authority of a popularly elected ruler be obeyed, but."more by the virtue of the people, than by the terror of his power." Be-cause virtue was truly the lifeblood of the republic, the thoughts and

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)From The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 15

hopes surrounding this concept of public spirit gave the Revolution itssocially radical character-an expected alteration in the very behavior ofthe people, "laying the foundation in a constitution, not without or over,but within the subjects." . .

This public virtue, "this endearing and benevolent passion," was "thenoblest which can be displayed" and represented all that men of the eigh-teenth century sought in social behavior. "Its grand source" lay in the at-titudes and actions of the individuals who made up the society, "in thatcharity which forms every social connection." In other words, publicvirtue, the willingness of the people to surrender all, even their lives, forthe good of the state, was primarily the consequence of men's individualprivate virtues. .. .. .. Formost Americansin 1776viciousbehaviorby anindividual could have.only disastrous results for the community. A manracked by the selfish passions of greed, envy, and hate lost his conceptionof order; "his sense of a connection with the general system-hisbenevo-lence-his desire and freedom of doinggood,ceased." It seemed obviousthat a republican society could not "be maintained without justice,.benevolence and the social virtues."" II..Somehow, as a:Boston writer ar- .

gued .. the individual's widening and traditionally weakening circlesof love-from himself to his family to the community-must be brokeninto; men must be convinced that their fullest satisfaction would cornefrom the subordination of their individual loves to the greater good of thewhole. It was man's duty and interest to be benevolent. "The happinessof every individual" depended "on the happiness of society." .. .. * Once.men correctly perceived their relation to the commonwealth'they wouldnever injure what was really their personal interest to protect and sus-tain. .

Equality

.. ......

Even the most radical republicans in 1776 admitted the inevitabilityof all natural distinctions: weak and strong, wise and foolish-and evenof incidental distinctions: rich and poor, learned and unlearned. Yet, ofcourse, in a truly republican society the artificial subsidiary distinctionswould never be extreme, not as long as they were based solely on naturaldistinctions. It was widely believed that equality of opportunity wouldnecessarily result in a rough equality o( station, that as long as the socialchannels of ascent and descent were kept open it would be impossible forany at:tificialaristocrats or overgrown .rich men to maintain themselvesfor long. With social movement founded only on merit, no distinctionscould have time to harden. .. .. .. And projected public educational systemswould open up the advantages of learning and advancement to all.

Great consequences were expected to flow from such an egalitarian 80-

16 GORDON S. WOOD

dety. H every man realized that his associations with other men and the. . statedepended solelyon his merit,then,as formerMassachusettsGover-.

nor Thomas Pownall told the Americans~there would be an end to thejealousy and the contentions for "unequal Dominion" that had besetcommunities from time immemorial. Indeed, equality represented the so-cial source from which the anticipated harmony and public virtue of theNew World would flow. ''It is this principle of equality. . .," wrote oneVIrginian in 1776,"which alone can inspire and preserve the virtue of itsmembers, by placing them in a relation to the publick and to their fellow-citizens, which has a tendency to engage the heart and affections to~~" .. .. .

It was a beautiful but ambiguous ideal. The Revolutionaries whohoped for so much from equality assumed that republican America.would be a community where none would be too rich or too poor, and

. yet at the same time believed that men would readily accede to such dis-tinctions as emerged as long as they were fairly earned. But ironicallytheir ideal contained the sources of the very bitterness and envy it was

.designed to eliminate. For if the promised equality was the kind in which"one should consider himself as good a man as another, and not be browbeaten or intimidated by riches or supposed superiority," then their newrepublican society would be no different from that in which they hadlived, and the Revolution would have failed to end precisely what it wassupposed to end. Indeed, although few Americans could ~dmit it in 1776,it was the very prevalence of this ambivalent attitude toward equality.that had been at the root of much of their squabbling during the eigh-teenth century. .

.. .. If

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS .. . .

~~.\Doclassieal republican values sound impractical for contemporary] American politics? Or do you think these values have more influ-

ence in politics than someone like Louis Hartz would acknowl-edge?

2. What are the key components of the classical rep~blican outlook, aspresented by Wood? How do they differ from the liberal tradition?

3. Wood notes at several points that some of the strengths of republi- .

. can thought would also prove to contain seeds of difficulty for re-..publicanism. Identify and describe these strengths.

4. How would you define "the public good"?

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"Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz:The Multiple Traditions in America"

. ROGERSM. SMITH

'\..

Whereliberalismand republicanismboth point to notions of equality,Rogers .

Smith argues that there is another tradition in American political thought tliathas been influential. Not denying the significimce of liberalism or republica/I-ism, Smith contends tllilt an equally significant strain of tllought, "ascriptivehierarchy," has been important across U.S. history. In this way of thinking, soci-eh} is a hierarchy, where some groups are 011top and others are below. Those 011top are deserving of all the rights and benefits the liberal tradition can offer; thosebelow are not. The most glaring examples of this throughout American historywere the treatment of racial minorities, especially blacks, and the treatment ofwomen. Smith notes that those holding these illiberal views were not 011 ti,efringes of society but, rather, were probably the majority tlietV. We cannot, Smithargues, marginalize the impact of "ascriptive American" hierarchy or those whoheld these views. American public policy at the highest levels was influenced. byits premises. Moreover, the same individuals often held these illiberal views illtandem with their liberal or republican views and expended great intellectual en-ergy to make these views seem acceptable in the light of ftmdamental Anzericatlbeliefs.. .

Since the nation's inception, analysts have described American politic~l. culture as the preeminent example of modern liberal democracy, of

government by popular consent with respect for the equal rights of all.TheyhaveportrayedAmericanpoliticaldevelopmentas the workingout .

of liberal democratic or republican principles, via both. "liberalizing" and. ."democratizing" socioeconomic changes and political efforts to cope with

tensions inherent in these principles. Illiberal, undemocratic beliefs andpractices have usually been seen only as expressions of ignorance andprejudice,destinedto marginalityby their lackof rationaldefenses... II-..

[Alexis de] Tocqueville's thesis-that America has been most shapedby the Unusually free and egalitarian ideas and material conditions thatprev~iled at its founding-:-captures important truths. Nonetheless, tlJ.e.purpose of this essay is to challenge that thesis by showing that its adher-

ents fail to give due weight to inegalitarian ideologies and ~nditions thathave shaped the participants and the substance of Ame. .J politics just

18 RqCER) SMITH

.as deeply. For over 80% of U.S. history, its laws declared most of the. world's population to be ineligible for full American citizenship solely

because of their race, original nationality, or gender. For at least. two-thirds of American hi,story,the majority of the domestic adult populationwas also ineligible for full citizenship for the same reasons. ... ... ... .

The Tocquevillianstory is thus deceptive because it is too narrow. It iscentered on relationships among a minority of Americans (white men,largely of northern European ancestry) analyzed via reference to cate-goriesderived from the hierarchy of political and economic statuses menhave held in Europe: monarchs and aristocrats, commercial burghers,farmers, industrial arid rural laborers, and indigents. Becausemost Euro-pean observers and BritishAmerican men have regarded these categoriesas politically fundamental, it is understandable that they have alwaysfound the most striking fact about the new nation to be its lack of onetype of ascriptive hierarchy. There was no hereditary monarchy or nobil-ity native to British A~erica, and the revolutionaries rejectedboth the au-thority of the British king and aristocracy and the creation of any newAmerican substitutes. Those features of American political life made theUnited States appear remarkably egalitarian by comparison with Europe.

But the comparative moral, material, and political egalitarianism thatprevailed at the founding among moderately propertied white men was

. surrounded by an array of other £peed,ascriptive systems of unequal sta-tus, all largely unchallenged. by the American revolutionaries. Men werethought naturally suited to rule over women, within both the family andthe poUty. White northern Europeans were thought superior culturally-and probably biologically-to black Africans, bronze Native Americans,and indeed all other races and civilizations. Many British Americans also.treated religion as an inherited condition and regarded Protestants as cre-ated by God to be morally and politically, as well as theologicall~ supe-rior to CathQlics, Jews, Muslims, and others.. . .

These. beliefs were not merely emotional prejudices or "attitudes."Over time, American intellectual and political elites elaborated distinc-tive justifications for these ascriptive systems, including inegalitarianscriptural readings, the scientific racism of the "American school" of eth-

nology, racial and sexual Darwinism, and the romantic cult of Anglo-Saxonism in American historiography. All these discourses identified thetrue meaning of Americanism with particular forms of cultural, religious, .

ethnic, and especially racial and gender hierarchies. Many adherents ofascriptive Americanist outlooks. insisted that the nation's political andeconomic structures should formally reflect natural and cultural inequal~.

ities, even at the cost of violating doctrines of universal rights. Althoughthese views.never entirely prevailed, their impact has been wide anddeep. . . .

Thus to approach a truer' picture of America's political culture and itscharacteristic conflicts, we must consider more than the familiar cate-

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. goriesof (absent) feudalism and socialism and (pervasive) bourgeois lib.,eralism and republicanism. The nation has also been deeply constitutedby the ideologies and practices that defined the relationships of the whitemale minority with subordinate groups, and the relationships of thesegroups with each other. When these elements are kept in view, the flatplain of American egalitarianism mapped by Tocqueville and others sud-denly looks quite different. We instead perceive America's initial condi-tions as exhibiting only a rather small, .recently leveled valley of relative'equality nestled amid steep mountains of hierarchy. And though we can .

see forces working to erode those mountains over time, broadening thevalley, many of the peakS also prove to be volcanic, frequently respond-ing to seismic pressures with outbursts that harden into. substantial peaksonce again.

To be sure, America's ascriptive, unequal statuses, and the ideologies.by. whiCh they have been defended have always been heavily condi-tioned and constrained by the presence of liberal democratic values andinstitutions. The reverse, however, is also true. Although liberal demo-cratic ideas and practices have been more potent in America than else-where, American politics is best seen as expressing' the interaction ofmultiple political traditions, including liberalism,'republicanism,and ascrip- .

tive forms of Americanism, which have collectively comprised .Americanpolitical culture, without any constituting it as a whole. Though Ameri- .

cans have often struggled over contradictions among these traditions, al~.. most all have tried to embrace what they saw as the best features of each:

Ascriptive outlooks have had such a hold in America because they. have provided somethingthat neither liberalismnor republicanismhas.done so well. They have offered creditable intellectual and psychologicalreasons for many Americans to believe that their social roles and per-sonal characteristics express an identity that has inherent and .transcen-dant worth, thanks to nature, history, and God. Those rationales haveobviously aided those who sat atop the nation's political, economic, andsocial hierarchies. But many Americans besides elites have felt that theyhave gained meaning, as well as. material and political benefits, fromtheir nation's traditional structures of ascribed places and destinies.

Conventional narratives, preoccupied with the absence of aristocracyand socialism, usually stress the liberal and democratic elements in therhetoric of even America's dissenters. These accounts fail to explain how

. and why liberalizing efforts have frequently lost to forces favoring newforms of racial and gender hierarchy: Those forces have sometimesnegated major liberal vi~tories, especially in the half-century followingReconstruction; and the fate of that era may be finding' echoes today.

My chief aim here is to persuade readers that many leading accountsof American political culture are inadequate. ... ... ... This argument is rele-vant to contemporary poli\ics in two ways. First, it raises the possibilitythat novel intellectu~l, political, and legal systems reinforcing racial, eth-

20 ROGERSM. SMITH

nic, and gender inequalities might be rebuilt in America in the yearsahead. That prospect does not seem plausible if the United States has al-

. ways been essentiallyliberaldemocratic,with all exceptionsmarginal. and steadily eliminated.It seems quite real, however, if liberal demo-. cratictraditionshave beenbut contestedpa:t;tsofAmericanculture,with.

inegalitarian ideologies and practices often resurging even after majorenhancements of liberal democracy. Second, the political implicationsof the view that America has never been completely liberal, and that.changes have come orily through difficult struggles and then have often1'\otbeen sustained, are very different from the complacency-sometimesdespair-engendered by beliefs that liberal democracy has always beenhegemonic.. . .. .

.. .. ..

The Multiple-Traditions Thesis of American Civic Identit!{

It seems prudent to stress what is not proposed here. This is not a call foranalysts to minimize the significance of white male political actors or.their conflicts with each other. Neither is it a call for accounts that as-sail "Eurocentric" white male oppressors on behalf of diverse but al-

. waysheroicsubjugatedgroups.Themultiple-traditionsthesisholds thatAmericans share a commonculture but one more complexly and multiplyconstitu,tedthan is usually acknowledged. Most members. of all groupshave shared and often helped to shape all the ideologies and institutionsthat have structured American life, including ascriptive ones. A few havedone so while resisting all subjugating practices. But members of ev-ery group have sometimes embraced "essentialist" ideologies valorizingtheir own ascriptive traits and denigrating those of others, to bleak effect.Cherokees enslaved blacks, champions of women's rights disparagedblacks and immigrants, and blacks have often been hostile toward His-panics and other new immigrants. White men, in turn, have been promi-nent among those combating invidious exclusions, as ~en as . thoseimposing them. .

Above all, recognition of the strong attractions of restrictive American-ist ideas does not imply any denial that America's liberal and democratictraditions have had great normative and political potency, even if theyhave not been so hegemonic as some claim. Instead, it sheds a new-and,in some respects, more flattering-light on the constitutive role ofJiberaldemocratic values in American life.Although some Americans have beenwilling to repudiate notions of democracy and universal rights, most

.have not; and though many have tried to blend those commitments withexclusionary ascriptive views, the illogic of these mixes has repe.atedly -

.prove.n a major resource for successful reformers. But we obscure the dif- .

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"Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz~' 21

ficulty of those reforms (and thereby diminish their significance) if weslight the ideological and political appeal of contrary ascriptive traditionsby portraying thero as merely the shadowy side of a hegemonic liberalrepublicanism.

At its heart, the multiple-traditions thesis holds that the definitive fea-ture of American political culture has been not its liberal, republican, or."ascriptive Americanist" elements but, rather, this more complex patternof apparently inconsistent combinations of the traditions, accompamed .by recurring conflicts. Because standard accounts neglect this pattern,they do not explore how and why Americans have tried to uphold as-pects of all three of these heterogeneous traditions in combinatio~ thatare longer on political and psychological appeal than on intellectual co.;herency. . .

A focus on these questions generates an understanding of Americanpolitics that differs from Tocquevillian ones in four major respects. First,on this view, purely liberal and republican conceptions of .civic identityare seen as frequently unsatisfying to many Americans, because they con-tain elements that threaten, rather than affirm, sincere, reputable beliefsin the propriety of the privileged positions . that whites, Christianity,Anglo-Saxon traditions, and patriarchy have had in the United States. Atthe same time, even Americans deeply attached to those inegalitarianarrangetnents have also had liberal democratic values. Second, it haptherefore been typical, not aberrational, for Americans to embody strik-ingiy opposed beliefs in their institutions, such as doctrines that blacksshould and should not be full and equal citizens. But though Americanefforts to blend aspects of opposing views have often been remarkablystable, the resulting tensions have still been important sources of change.Third, when older types of ascriptive inequality, such as slavery, have

. been rejected as unduly illiberal, it has been normal, not anomalous, for~any Americans to embrace new doctrines and institutions that reinvig-orate the hierarchies they esteem in modified form. Changes toward

. greater inequality and exclusion, as well as toward greater equality andinclusiveness, thus can and do occur. Finally, the dynamics of Americandevelopment cannot simply be seen as a rising tide of liberalizing forcesprogressively submerging contrary beliefs and practices. The. natiortal .course has been more serpentine. The economic, political, and moralforces propelling the United States toward liberal democracy have oftenbeen heeded by American leaders, especially since World War II. But thecurrents pulling toward fuller expression of alleged natural and culturalinequalities have also always won victories. In some eras they have pre- .

dominated, appearing to define not only the path of safety but that ofprogress. In all eras, including our own, many Americans have combinedtheir allegiance to liberal democracy with beliefs that the presence of cer-

. tain groups favored by history, nature, and God has II' )Americans

, .22 ,ReGER ;.' SMITH

an intrinsically "special" people. Their adherents have usually regardedsuch beliefs as benign and intellectually well founded; yet they also havealways had more or less harsh discriminatory corollaries.

To test these multiple-traditions claims, consider the United States in1870.By then the Civil War and Reconstruction had produced dramaticadvances in the liberal and democratic character of America's laws. Slav-

, erywasabolished.Allpersonsborn in theUnitedStatesand subjecttoitsjurisdiction were deemed citizens of the United States and the states inwhich they resided, regardless of their race, creed or gender. None couldbe denied voting rights on racial ground,s. The civil rights of all werenewly protected through an array of national statutes. The 1790ban onnaturalizing Africans had been repealed, and expatriation declared anatural right. Over the past two decades women had become more polit-ically engaged and had begun to gain respect as political acto~s.

It It It

[Neither liberal or republican analyses] would have had the intellec-tual resources to explain what in fact occurred. Over the next fifty years,Americans did not make blacks, women, and members of other races fulland equal citizens, nor did racial and gender prejudices undergo major

, erosion. Neither, however, were minorities and women declared to besubhuman and outside the body politic. And although white Americansengaged in extensive violence against blacks and Nab~e Americans,those groups grew in population, and no cataclysm loomed. Instead, in-tellectual ana political elites worked out the most elaborate theories ofracial and gender hierarchy in U.S. history and partially embodied themin a staggering array of new laws governing naturalization, immigration,deportation, voting rights, electoral institutioJ:lS, judicial procedures, andeconomic rights-but only partially. The laws retained important liberaland democratic features, and some were strengthened. They had enoughpurchase on the moral and material interests of most Americans to com- '

pel advocates of inequality to adopt contrived, often clumsy means toachieve their ends. ' ' ,

The considerable success of the proponents of inegalitarian ideas re-flects the power these traditions have long had in America. But after theCivil War, It ItItevolutionary theories enormously strengthened the ,intel-lectual prestige of doctrines presenting the races and sexes as naturally,arrayed into what historians have termed a "raciocultural hierarchy," aswell as a "hierarchy of sex." Until the end of the _nineteenth century, mostevolutionists It It It thought acquired characteristics could be inherited.Thus beliefs in biological differences were easily merged with the It It It

historians' views that peoples were the products of historical and culturalforces. Both outlooks usually presented the current traits of the races asfixed for the foreseeable future. Few intellectuals were shy about noting

, the implications of these views for public policy. Anthropologist Daniel

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)"Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz" 23

G. Brinton made typical arguments in his 1895presidential address to theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science. He contendedthat the "black, brown and red races" each had "a peculiar mental tem-perament which has become hereditary," leaving them constitutionally"recreant to the codes of civilization." Brinton believed that this fact hadnot been adequately appreciated by American lawmakers. Henceforth,conceptions of "race, nations, tribes" had to "supply the only sure foun-dationsfor legislatiqn;not apriorinotionsof the rightsofman." '

As Brinton knew, many politicians and judges had already begun toseize on such suggestions. In 1882, for example, California senator JohnMiller drew on the Darwinian "law of the 'survival of the fittest''' to ex-

plain that "forty centuries of Chinese life" had "ground into" the Chineserace characteristics that made them unbeatable competitors against thefree white man. They were "automatic engines of flesh and blood," of"obtuse nerve," marked by degradation and demoralization, and'thus farbelow the Anglo-Saxon, but were still a threat to the latter's livelihood ina market economy. Hence, Miller argued, the immigration of Chinese la-borers must be banned. His bill prevailed, many expressing concern thatthese Chinese would otherwise become American citizens. The ChineseExclusion Act was not a vestige of the past but something v.ew, the firstrepudiation of America's long history of open immigration; and it wasjustified in terms of the postwar era's revivified racial theories.' .

, Yet although men like Miller nbt only sustained but expanded Chineseexclusions until they were made virtually total in 1917 (and tight restric-tions survived until 1965), they never managed to deny American citizen;'ship to all of the "Chinese race." Until 1917 there were no restrictions onthe immigration of upper-class Chinese, and in 1898 the Supreme Courtdeclared that children born on U.S. soil to Chinese parents were Ameri-can citiz~ns (United States v. Wong Kim Ark 1898). Birthplace citizenshipwas a doctrine enshrined in common law, reinforced by the FourteenthAmendment, and vital to citizenship for the children of all immigrantaliens. Hence it had enough legal and political support to override theCourt's recognition of Congress's exclusionary desires. Even so, in othercases the Court sustained bans on Chinese immigration while admittingthe racial animosities behind them, as in the "Chinese Exclusion Case"(ClzaeChanPing v. United States1889); upheld requirements for Chinese-Americans to have certificates of citizenship not required of whites (FongYueTing v. United States1893);and permitted officials to deport even Chi-nese personS who had later been judged by courts to be native-born U.S.citizens (United States v. Ju Toy 1905).

The upshot, then, was the sort of' none-too-coherent mix that the .

multiple-traditions thesis holds likely. Chinese were excluded on racialgrounds, but race did not bar citizenship to those born in the UnitedStatesi yet Chinese ancestry could subject some American citizens to bur-dens, including deportation, that others did not face. The mix was not

24 ROGERSM. SMITH

perfect from any ideological viewpoint, but it was politically popular. Itmaintained a valued inclusive feature of American law (birthplace citi-zenship) while sharply reducing the resident Chinese population. And itmost fully satisfied the increasingly powerful champions of Anglo-?axonsupremacy. . .

From 1887 on, academic reformers and politicians sought to restrictimmigration more generally by a means that paid lip service to liberalnomis even as it aimed at racist results-:-the literacy test. On its face, thismeasure expressed concern only for the intellectual merits ofimmigrants.But the test's true aims were spelled out in 1896,by its sponsor, SenatorHenry Cabot Lodge, a Harvard Ph.D. in history and politics. Committeeresearch, he reported, showed that the test would exclude "the Italians,Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics," thereby preserving

, "the quality of our race and citizenship."Citing "modem history",and"modern science," Thomas Carlyle and Gustave Ie Bon,Lodge contendedthat the need for racial exclusion arose from "somethmg deeper andmore fundamental than anything which concerns the intellect." Race wasabove all constituted by moral characteristics, the "stock of ideas, tradi-tions, sentiments, modes of thought" that a people possessed as an "accu-mulation of centuries of toil and conflict." These mental and moralqualities constituted the "soul of a .race," an inheritance in which itsmembers "blindly believe," and upon which learning had no effect. Butthese qualities could be degraded if"a lower race mix~ith a higher";thus, exclusion by race, not reading ability, was the 'nation's proper goal.'When the literacy test finally passed in 1917but proved ineffective in

keeping out "lower races," Congress moved to versions of an explicitlyracistnational-originsquota system. It banned virtually all Asians.and'

perinitted European immigration only in ratios preserving the northernEuropean cast of the American citizenry. Congressman Albert Johnson,

, chiefauthor of the most important quota act in 1924,proclaimed thattiu-ouglt it~"the day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races, has deft-ni,tely ended." The quota system, repealed only in 1965, was a novel,elaborate monument to ideologies holding that access to Amepcan citi.:.zenship should be subject to racial and ethnic limits. It also served as the .

prime model for similar systems in Europe and Latin America... .. ..

But despite the new prevalence of such attitudes' on the part of north-ern and western elites in the late nineteenth century, the Reconstructionamendments and statutes were still on the books, and surviving liberalsentiments made repealing them politically difficult. Believers in racialinequality were, moreover, undecided on just what to ,do about blacks... .. .. "Radical" racists .. .. .. argued that blacks, like other lower races, shouldbe excluded from American society and looked hopefully for evidence

t~at th~y"weT' )!rig out. Their, position was ,consistent wi~ Hartz's

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"Beyond Tocqueville,Myrda!, and Hartz" , 25

'claim that Americans could not tolerate permanent unequal statuses; per-sons must either be equal citizens or outsiders. But" .. .. "Conservatives"believed... .. .. that blacksand otherpeopleof colormight insteadhave apermanent "place" in America, so long as "placeness included hierar-chy." Some still thought that blacks, like the other "lower races," mightone day be led by whites to fullycivilizedstatus, but no one expected .

progress in the near future. Thus blacks should instead be segregated,largely disfranchised, and confined to menial occupations via inferior ed-ucation and discriminatory hiring practices-but not expelled, tortured,or killed. A few talented blacks might even be allowed somewhat higherstations. . .

.. .. .. The result was a system closest to Conservative desires, one thatkept blacks in their place, although that place was structured more re-pressively than most Conservatives favored. And unlike the ineffectiveliteracy test, here racial inegalitarians achieved much of wha,t theyw.anted without explicitly violating liberal legal requirements. Complexregistration systems, poll taxes, and civics tests appeared race-neutral but.were designed and administered to disfranchise blacks. This intentwas little masked. .. .. .. These efforts succeeded. Most dram~tically, inLouisiana 95.6% of blacks were registered in 1896, and over half (130,000)voted. After disfranchising measures, black registration dropped by 90% '

and by 1904 totaled only 1,342. The Supreme Court found convolutedways to close its eyes to these tactics.' ' -

By similar. devices, blacks were virtually eliminated from juries in thesouth, where 90% of American blacks lived, sharply limiting their abilityto have their personal and economic rights protected by the ~ourts. "Sep-arate but equal" educational and business laws and practices also stifledthe capacities of blacks to participate in the nation's economy as equals,severely curtailed the occupations they could train for, and markedthem-unofficially but clearly-as an inferior caste. Thus here, as else-,where, it was evident that the nation's laws and institutions were notmeant to confer the equal civic status they proclaimed for all Americans;but neither did they conform fully to doctrines favoring overt racial hier-archy. They represented another asymmetrical compromise among' themultiple ideologies vying to define American political culture.

So, too, did the policies governing two groups whose civic status for-mally improved during these years: Native A~ericans ~d women. .. .. ..

.. .. ..

This period also highlights how the influence of inegalitarian doctrineshas not been confined to white male intellectuals, legislators, and judges.The leading writer of the early twentieth-century women's movement,,Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was a thoroughgoing Darwinian who ac-,cepted that evolutio~ had made women inferior to. ~n in certamrespects, although she insisted that these differences ~ )1sually exag-

426 RcrcER~) SMITH

gerated and that altered social conditions could transform them. Andeven as he attacked. Booker T..Washington for appearing to accept the

."alleged inferiority of the Negro race," W. E. B. DuBois embraced thewidespread Lamarckian view that racial characteristics were socially.conditioned but then inherited as the "soul" of a race. He could thus ac-cept that mostblackswere "primitivefolk"in need of tutelage... .

The acceptance of ascriptive inegalitarian beliefs by brilliant and politi-cally dissident female and black male intellectuals strongly suggests thatthese ideas had broad appeal. Writers whose .interests they did not easilyserve still saw them as persuasive in light of contemporary scientifictheo-ries and empirical evidence of massive inequalities. It is likely,too, that formany the vision of a meaningful natural order that these doctrinesprovided.

. had the psychologicaland philosophical appeal that such positionshave.al-ways had for human beings, grounding their status arid significanceinsomethinggreaterand moreenduringthan theirownlives... .. ..

In sum, if we accept that ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hier-archy have shaped America in interaction with its liberal and democraticfeatures, we can make more sense of a wide range of inegalitarian poli-cies newly contrived after 1870 and perpetuated through much of thetwentieth century. Those policies were dismantled only through greatstruggles, aided by international pressures during World War II and theCold War; and it is n.otclear that these struggles have ended. The novel-ties in the policies.and scientific doctrines of the GildedAge and Progres-sive Era should alert us to the possibility that new intellectual systemsand political forces defending racial and gender inequalities may yet gainincreased power in ~ur own time.

.. .. ..

. The achievements of An;\ericansin building a more inclusive democ-r;:lcycertainly provide reasons to believe that illiberal forces will not pre-vail. But just as we can better explain the nation's past by recognizing

. how and why liberal democratic principles have been contested with fre-quent success, we will better understand the present and future of Amer-ican politics if we do not presume they are rooted in essentially liberal or~emocratic values and conditions. Instead, we must analyze. America asthe ongoing product of often conflicting multiple traditions.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. According to Smith, what are some examples of how Americans inthe late nineteenth century simultaneously held liberal and ascrip-tive Americanist views?

2. Do you believe that ascriptive hierarchy is still a powerful strain ofthought in American political culture? If so, what are some examples?

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