“Jacques Barzun,” says New York Times columnist David Brooks, “once observed that of all the books it is impossible to write, the most impossible is a book trying to capture the spirit of America.”
Said Walt Whitman in his poem Leaves of Grass, “Very well, then I contradict myself / I am large, I contain multitudes.” The ethnic, social, and economic makeup of America is varied and constantly changing. Alexis de Tocqueville described America as a country of “ceaseless agitation.” Such agitation creates an “all-pervading and restless activity, a superabundant force, and an energy … which may, however unfavorable circumstances may be, produce wonders.”
America is famous for its log cabins; out of many log cabins have emerged many self-made men. Even better, as the saying goes, “He was born in a log cabin he built with his own hands!”
America accomplishes these wonders by being a country obsessed with moving forward. “America is a country of the future,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. “It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.” Several of our presidents were very firm about this. John Quincy Adams, when he was Monroe’s secretary of state, advised a German baron about immigrants to America, “They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They must look forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors.”
Equally unequivocal in his advice was President Woodrow Wilson: “You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.” Said Theodore Roosevelt:
One absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality.
America’s original heritage may be European and partially African, but its character is oriented toward the frontier. George Washington had never been to Europe; when the Marquis de Lafayette proposed to Washington in 1783 that he come visit Europe, Washington declined; if he was going to take a trip, he would rather visit “the New Empire” stretching from the Carolinas via the Mississippi to Detroit. So, too, would Henry David Thoreau: “Eastward I go by force, but westward I go free….I must walk toward Oregon and not toward Europe.” But what happened when we reached the end of the frontier, as asked in the 1890s by Frederick Jackson Turner? Other than an eventual inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii, Americans had no choice but to confront and accept their limits. Said Herbert Agar after the end of the Second World War, “We are all descendants of people who fled from Europe….Our instinctive wish is to be left alone by Europe, to stop fretting about Europe, to turn our eyes toward the Pacific….We belong to the West, without which we must perish. We do not belong to Asia.”
Americans may belong more to the West than to Asia, but they are not Europeans, they are different. Nobody expressed this better than the great Prussian officer sent by the French to instill some discipline in Washington’s ragtag troops at Valley Forge in 1775. He was Baron von Steuben: “The genius of this nation is not in the least to be compared with that of the Prussians, Austrians or French. You say to your soldier, ‘Do this,’ and he doeth it, but I am obliged to say, ‘This is the reason why you ought to do that,’ and he does it.”
In other words, there’s a fundamental difference between Americans and Europeans or Asians: respect for the dignity and rights of the individual. You don’t order a person what to do, you persuade him.
The Englishman Thomas B. Macaulay once observed, “Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.” For most countries whose past goes back to the Middle Ages and earlier, the past is a ready anchor. America, on the other hand, never had this advantage and so became entirely different: a forward-thinking nation. When Henry Ford said “history is bunk,” he was maligned by historians. But he never said it quite so crudely. In fact, he knew his history better than did most historians, and to prove it he created an enormous replica of the past, the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Here is what he said, in its full context: “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.” Likewise, on another occasion, he stated, “I don’t know anything about history. I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world….I don’t want to live in the past. I want to live in the Now.”
Henry Ford wasn’t talking about history; he was talking about progress and the future. So, too, was Benjamin Franklin. Once he was rescued from a shipwreck. After expressing his feelings of thanksgiving and gratitude, he was asked if he planned to build a chapel to memorialize his rescue. “No, indeed not,” he responded. “I’m going to build a lighthouse!”
In 1789, after the French revolutionaries had stormed the Bastille, Lafayette sent President George Washington a most unusual gift to symbolize the spread of American democratic ideals to France. It was a key to the prison.
Unfortunately, as the Jacobins took over, it became clear that the spread of American ideals did not match American expectations. In a scene repeated numerous times over the next two hundred years, most recently in Iran, Cuba, Russia, and Iraq, revolts against despotism matured into despotism under new leaders. Yet the dream of America—a house in suburbia with a two-car garage—rings loud and clear throughout the world, propagated by Hollywood movies. Observed a Frenchman in 1932:
The West has thought for a long time, not without a certain naïveté, that it represented spirituality in the world. But is spirituality really the message we have taken along with us everywhere? What has been borrowed from us … is our mechanisms. Today, in the most remote, most ancient villages, one finds the automobile, the cinema, the radio, the telephone, the phonograph, not to mention the airplane….
The United States is presiding at a general reorganization of the ways of living throughout the world.
The one really new gospel we have introduced is the revelation, after centuries of passively endured privations, that a man may at last free himself of poverty, and, most fantastic innovation of all, that he may actually enjoy his existence….And so, without our wishing it, or even knowing it, we appear as the terrible instigators of social change and revolution.
The major revolutionary message the world was interested in hearing was not ideological but material. Slogans like “free enterprise” and “democracy” have little meaning in countries without the means to pay for it. In spreading the American gospel to other parts of the world, it is useful to remember the natural abundance we enjoyed as we started our democratic revolution, followed by our technological ingenuity, that created further abundance and growing self-sufficiency. When our system collapsed in the Depression, FDR proposed his Four Freedoms. The first two were political: freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But the second two—freedom from want and freedom from fear—were essentially economic. Democracy and economic prosperity go hand in hand.
One of the perplexing aspects of America is the existence of slavery in a country of freedom and opportunity. “A snake in the garden of freedom,” Alexis de Tocqueville called it. How could this happen? According to David Halberstam:
America was the only one of the developed nations that, for a variety of reasons—climate, richness and abundance of fertile land—had experienced its colonial era on native soil. When the age of empire was finally over in the middle of the twentieth century, all the other colonial powers could pull back, announce they were out of the business of empire, and cut, if it were, the umbilical cord that bound colony to mother country. In America that, of course, was impossible.
In other words, it was easy for France and England to ban slavery because they never had to live with it. Slavery for them was always offshore. America was different.
In attempting to deal with this issue, one of the benefits of having a Constitution all sail and no anchor is that the Constitution is “what the judges say it is” (Charles Evans Hughes), which is why British prime minister William Gladstone called it “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” History would support this conclusion: our Constitution and Bill of Rights, by lasting virtually intact for more than 230 years, have set the world record for continuous government. There is not a country in the world that can approach this remarkable feat.
But the beginning was not easy. Of the fifty-five delegates who drafted the Constitution, only thirty-nine signed it. Just to get these votes, the Federalists had to promise they would propose and support a Bill of Rights. That project took another two years, and included a specific provision that any powers not delegated to the new government be reserved for the states and the people.
How the Constitution evolved in actual practice was never a straight line, nor was its survival assured. When President Eisenhower in 1953 chose Governor Earl Warren of California for chief justice, people were astounded that the Supreme Court would be headed by a politician, not a legal scholar. They underestimated what Eisenhower was doing: selecting a man who knew how to bargain and cut a deal. When the new chief justice decided to take on the school desegregation issue presented by Brown v. Board of Education, he made a bold gamble: all or nothing. Given the gravity of the decision, the decision must be unanimous. “He wanted no dissents or concurrences that lower courts, legal scholars, the press, and other commentators could pick apart.”
It took a politician, working behind closed doors of the Supreme Court chambers, to bring the recalcitrant judges in line and achieve what the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and countless judges had failed to do. Such was America, a country all sail and no anchor. And what kind of a man was Earl Warren to achieve this? Like Benjamin Franklin and like Lincoln, he was an optimist. Every morning when he got the newspaper, he would read the sports pages first. “They record people’s accomplishments,” he said, not the failures that made up most of the rest of the news.
There is a famous line in American jurisprudence that says “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience” (Oliver Wendell Holmes). Once again, a positive statement, implying progress and improvement—and a use of the past. When Abraham Lincoln crafted his Gettysburg Address, he didn’t refer to the beginning of the United States as 1789, when the country was formed, he referred to an earlier time—1776 (“four score and seven years ago”). More important than the country’s government was the idealism that created it.
1700 Slavery, that “peculiar institution,” was not peculiar to America, but what was special was the way it evolved into an institution of ingrained racism according to which blacks were inferior to whites. Only in America could there emerge, as one Afro-American historian wryly put it, “the traditional idea that slaves enjoyed their situation, that Africans looked forward to traveling abroad, and what better way than a free trip on one of Her Majesty’s slave ships.”
The first blacks to be shipped to America beginning in 1619 were not slaves but indentured servants—as were many whites. This was the practice in Europe, where indentured servants were treated with respect, often as side-by-side equals, with the right to go free after a fixed period of service. But unlike in Europe, land in America was plentiful and dirt-cheap, necessitating the importation of tens of thousands of indentured servants. Africa being the cheapest source of those servants, and also not protected by European laws concerning the natural rights of man, there emerged the practice of servitude for life for blacks. By the early 1700s this concept of indefinite servitude had been stretched further to incorporate the view of slaves as chattel, to be freely sold and traded by their owners. A black man was not a man, he was an inferior man—later codified in the Constitution as three-fifths of a man in apportioning votes.
In less than one hundred years, from 1619 to the early 1700s, slavery had evolved from an economic transaction to being rationalized as a legitimate if racist institution. How could this happen in a nation supposedly devoted to the ideals of freedom and liberty? Why here in America, and nowhere else in the world?
The answer lies in the way slavery and cruelty enslave the master, not just the victim, and bring out the worst in people—a phenomenon witnessed later in the Nazi treatment of Jews in World War II and the Serbian treatment of Muslims in Bosnia. Says former Princeton professor Henry Drewry:
I suggest that instead of mistreating black men because they hated them, whites may have come to hate black men because they mistreated them … On the one hand Americans were proclaiming liberty, equality, and the rights of man, and on the other they were saying they wanted a system which controlled black men and allowed whites to have blacks to do their bidding in all things whatsoever….To resolve the conflict whites rationalized that slaves were not entitled to things others were entitled to because they were somehow subhuman.
I suggest that it is not in spite of the Declaration of Independence and concern with the rights of man that slavery developed in such a peculiar way; rather, it is because of the Declaration of Independence and the beliefs in liberty and equality that American slavery developed the way it did. If an American was to believe in lofty ideals, he could not believe in them comfortably and deny them to certain men. So the only solution was to believe in these high ideals and at the same time believe that black people who were enslaved and mistreated were not men.
This idea that slavery enslaves the slaver is not a new thought; it was stated by Thomas Jefferson in his 1783 Notes on Virginia, where he admitted that slavery, by “permitting one half of the citizens … to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots.” Added Henry James in 1863, “It is only the master who … seems to have been degraded by it.”
In 1852, the New York Times had sent Frederick Law Olmsted, later to become famous as the landscape architect of Central Park in New York, the U.S. Capitol Building, and many other famous parks and gardens, on a tour of the South. Olmsted produced a two-volume book, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave Trade, that stands as one of the most powerful exposés ever written. This young man did not mince words: in addition to exposing the fallacy that slavery was economically profitable, he identified the root problem: Southem self-rationalization. Nowadays it makes for astounding—if not tragic—reading:
The present attitude of the South still finds a mode of justification with many minds, in the broad assertion that the negro is not of the nature of mankind, therefore cannot be a subject of inhumanity. This, of course, sweeps the field, if it does anything….
South of Virginia, an intelligent man or woman is rarely met who does not maintain, with the utmost apparent confidence, that the people who do the work of the North are, on the whole, harder driven, worse fed, and more destitute of comfort than are the slaves of the South.
Olmsted related an encounter with a Northern gentleman on a Mississippi riverboat steamer, talking about a conference of Southerners he had recently attended: “They believed the South the centre of Christianity and the hope of the world, while they had not the slightest doubt that the large majority of the people of the North were much more to be pitied than their own negroes.”
Obviously, one of the legacies of slavery was to cause Southerners to sink into a dream world, devoid of reality. In 1994 America’s most prominent Afro-American pointed to this truth. At a time when he was touted as a potential presidential candidate, General Colin Powell was asked by Newsweek what advice he would give young blacks. He counseled “young blacks not to let racism be their problem: ‘Let it be a problem to someone else. You can’t change it. Don’t have a chip on your shoulder, and don’t think everyone is staring at you because you’re black….Let it drag them down.’”
1774 The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington, Virginia, honors a brave World War I soldier of unknown identity. In the Old Cadet Chapel at West Point is another memorial for a brave soldier who fought for his country in the American Revolution. His plaque, too, is nameless.
But we know who he was.
The 1774 Battle of Saratoga was the turning point of the American Revolution, won in large part by the extraordinary bravery of one general who “turned likely defeat into momentous victory.” He fell wounded, and today that spot is marked by a monument hailing him as “The Most Brilliant Soldier of the Continental Army.” Had the man died, his name would have entered the annals of America’s greatest generals. But unfortunately he lived.
Lying in the hospital for weeks with a leg badly fractured by a musket ball, he seethed with fury that all the glory went to General Horatio Gates, who got a special medal from Congress while he got nothing. Angry at his fellow Americans for failing to give him what he considered his due, and unable to recognize that it was his arrogance and personal vanity that made people dislike him, he sought recognition from others—like the British. Today the name Benedict Arnold is associated with treason.
1776 July 2: Up for ratification by the thirteen colonies was the resolution declaring independence. For ratification to pass, seven out of the thirteen had to approve. For a colony to approve, a majority of delegates was required. But in reality, a simple majority of delegates and colonies was not enough; the vote for a move so bold had to be unanimous. Nothing less would do.
Back in June, Thomas Jefferson had learned that six colonies were likely to vote no. If one of the seven likely “yes” colonies changed its vote, the independence movement would be dead in the water. With a month to go, it was essential to garner more support.
On July 1, the day before the showdown, the Continental Congress took a trial vote and concluded that a positive movement was well under way: the vote in favor was now 9–2, with one tie and one abstention. The two colonies ready to vote negative were Pennsylvania and South Carolina, the colony tied was Delaware, and the colony abstaining was New York. With twenty-four hours left to go, the independence supporters, led by Samuel Adams and John Adams of Massachusetts, put the pressure on the recalcitrants led by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania.
How one would have loved to be “a fly on the wall”! But alas, there were no “leaks” in those days, no self-justifying journals by the protagonists. All we know—and some of these stories may be apocryphal—is the following:
When John Hancock said, “We must all hang together,” Benjamin Franklin responded, “Yes. We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately!” Adding to the drama was the giant Benjamin Harrison of Virginia (father and great-grandfather of U.S. presidents), a bull of a man at six feet four inches and 240 pounds. He picked up the diminutive Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts (later vice president of the United States under Madison), deposited him on a chair, and shouted, “With me, it [hanging] will all be over in a minute. But you, you’ll be dancing on air an hour after I’m gone.”
Caesar Rodney, back home in Delaware, hearing he was needed immediately within twenty-four hours, outdid Paul Revere and rode the eighty miles on horseback to Philadelphia to arrive just in time to cast the tie-breaking vote that tipped Delaware into the independence column, two votes to one.
In an act of remarkable magnanimity, the two Pennsylvania delegates most opposed, John Dickinson and Robert Morris, abstained from voting so as to enable the three pro-independence delegates to carry the state, three votes to two (out of a total of seven).
The youngest delegate, twenty-six-year-old Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, persuaded his brother-in-law Thomas Middleton to sign, thus putting the pressure on the other two delegates to switch their votes.
When an alarming message arrived from George Washington, reporting that the British were about to attack New York, the state’s four delegates, deadlocked but fearing being abandoned, finally went along.
The final vote of the thirteen colonies on that pivotal day: 13–0. Even the delegates themselves were stunned by their achievement. It was a day, wrote John Adams, that “ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”
Still to be resolved were some disputes over the wording of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. It wasn’t until two days later that the final document was ready. In celebrating their July Fourth national holiday,* Americans are really celebrating the miracle that took place between July first and July second.
1783 The concept of a unified nation took many years to catch hold. The English made sure of that by insisting, as a last-minute demand before recognizing independence in 1783, that the thirteen colonies be listed individually under the country name “United States of America.” Says historian Don Cook, “The English diplomats believed this would convey that these were not truly united states and that England had not yet relinquished those last connections in the capitals once ruled by royal governors.” To make sure the rebels got the message, the British foreign minister refused to send an envoy to the infant republic, saying he could not afford to send thirteen.
True to form, the new country behaved like a collection of squabbling states and unclaimed territories, all with different ideas of liberty and equality. For example, in New Jersey but nowhere else, women had the right to vote. In some states, a black man counted as three-fifths of a person in calculating population and number of seats in the House of Representatives; in other states, he counted not at all.
Disagreements among the states were frequent and occasionally bitter enough to provoke talk of secession, new constitutions, and independent nation-states. During the wrangling over the proposed Jay Treaty of 1795, New Jersey and other states threatened to secede if the treaty was not ratified; that the treaty eventually got the necessary two-thirds majority, but just barely, was due only to heavy lobbying by President Washington. During the War of 1812, public opinion in support of the war was so weak in New England that the governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island flatly refused to call their state militias into national service. New England politicians got together for a convention in Hartford in 1814, talked of potential secession, and agreed to lend no more money to the national government. The founder of the Massachusetts General Hospital and a leading figure of the day, a holder of several university honorary degrees, proposed a new constitution for the United States that would recast the map and exclude any people living in the area defined by the Louisiana Purchase.
Unlike the first thirty years of the republic, when the predominant issue had been one of national independence and coexistence with powerful European nations, the major issue after Andrew Jackson became president in 1828 was one of continental expansion. This was a divisive issue, revealing sectional and state loyalties that far overrode national patriotism.
The defining moment of national unity came only in 1863 when Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, advocating “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Until the Civil War, the United States had been a collection of states and territories, all with different laws regarding equality and liberty. The name of the country before Gettysburg was usually expressed as a plural: “The United States are a free country.” After Gettysburg it finally became a singular: “The United States is a free country.”
Observes the historian Marcus Cunliffe, “America became a nation legally before it was one emotionally.” Born of a revolution and more loyal to their particular state or region than to their country, Americans needed almost one hundred years and a civil war before they could think of themselves as one nation. Even as late as 1860, people were coming up with all kinds of strange ideas about how to organize the states. The commanding general of the United States armies and 1852 presidential candidate, Winfield Scott, sent a memo to President Buchanan (with a copy to president-elect Lincoln): “Views Suggested by the Imminent Danger of a Disruption of the Union by the Secession of One or More of the Southern States.” In this memo Scott proposed, as a lesser evil to war, that the United States reorganize itself into four countries: the Eastern Northern States, the Old South, the Middle West, and the Far West. Obviously, for such a preposterous notion to be suggested, people did not have much confidence in the concept of a single, unified country.
There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains greater influence over the souls of men than in America.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
1789 When James Madison sat down in 1789 to draft amendments to the Constitution to reassure the thirteen colonies that they would not be overwhelmed by the power of the proposed new central government, his first order of business was religion. More than the right to bear arms, trial by jury, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, religion was an issue that had to be dealt with forcefully. Out of Madison’s proclamations on religion came even broader freedoms. The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, written by Madison, guarantees not only separation of church and state but also the freedom to worship, freedom of speech and press, and the right to assemble.
Why religion first and foremost? Because the colonies’ first experiment with religion had been extensive—and disastrous. There had been no separation of church and state, in fact just the opposite. Every colony had its own official religion. New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut were Congregational; Rhode Island was Baptist (although other Protestant sects were still welcome); New York and New Jersey were Dutch Reformed; Delaware was Lutheran; Pennsylvania was Quaker; Maryland was Catholic; and Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were Anglican (Episcopal).
Anybody emigrating to America would have been well advised to check just where the boat was going. Interlopers and infidels were not welcome. Twelve of the thirteen colonies, for example, had strident anti-Quaker laws. When Puritan Massachusetts banished several Quakers and they tried to return to Boston, it hanged them.
1790 So said Alexander Hamilton, meaning that America was essentially an Anglo-Saxon nation. For one of our Founding Fathers to say this, so soon after a bitter six-year war with the British, may strike people as a bit bizarre. Hardly. “Let us remember,” said the American-born Nancy Astor, a member of the British Parliament in the 1930s, “that the American War of Independence was fought by British Americans against a German king and a reactionary prime minister for British ideals.”
Americans have long believed that the United States has been unique because of its democracy. This is wrong. While the United States was the first country to break free from its mother country and declare independence, many Latin American countries soon followed. Today all of these countries are liberated, most of them have free “democratic” elections (even if the president acts high-handedly), press freedom is limited, and corruption is commonplace.
What set America apart from other emerging nations was its heritage of British laws and institutions. This should be no surprise: before the American Revolution, the colonies and England were together for almost 170 years. Capitalism, property rights, respect for the individual, due process of law, trial by jury, and right of representative assembly all came from immigrants from England. Mercantile transactions, insurance policies, and credit instruments subject to English law became the basis of American commercial activity. When Hamilton said, “We think in English,” he was referring to British common law, rooted in religious principles, and concepts of “Natural Law,” which held that a person is endowed by his Creator with a right to life, liberty, and property, and that individual rights are derived from a Higher Power—not from the government.
In Hamilton’s view—he was a financier, after all—freedom depended on the security of one’s property. He wasn’t the only one who thought this way; joining him were Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Adams. Said John Adams, “Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.”
The key to property was not owning or inheriting it like an aristocrat, but doing something with it. Benjamin Franklin, who spent fourteen years of his life in London—his favorite years—said, “People do not enquire concerning a Stranger, What IS he?, but What can he DO?” People were expected to improve themselves. Same for property: property rights were sacrosanct but not absolute. The British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) argued that only “by adding labour to things found in a state of nature” could people “exercise a maker’s right that entitled them to articles, including fields.” According to the British concept of property rights, squatters and beneficiaries of government land grants must improve the land in order to claim it in perpetuity and enjoy the full protection of due process. In 1844 newspaper editor Horace Greeley made his famous exhortation, “Go West, young man.” Less well known is the rest of the sentence: “and grow up with the country.” In other words, do something with it, improve it. The American Homestead Act of 1862 was very specific that free land from the government could only be earned by making improvements. In time this concept of improvement expanded to intellectual rights, the source of many trade disputes and legal battles today. Even U.S. patent law draws directly from British concepts of commerce. Also owing a great debt to the British is the limited-liability company, originated by the Dutch in the 1600s and refined by the British in the 1800s, that formed the basis of capitalism. Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia University president and Nobel Prize laureate, “equated the invention of the limited liability corporation with that of steam locomotion and electricity.”
By the later nineteenth century America had started to become a world power. In 1898 Prince Otto von Bismarck was asked the decisive factor in modern history. He replied, “The fact that the North Americans speak English.”
Said John Hay, U.S. secretary of state, “The one indispensable feature of our foreign policy should be a friendly understanding with England.” He wasn’t talking about a peace between two nations, any more than was George Bernard Shaw in his glib quote, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” The basis of common language is shared values, in this case such values being separation of church and state, separation of government powers, free speech, personal freedom, abhorrence of bribery and corruption, and encouragement of capitalism and the private sector. Years later, Winston Churchill (who had an American mother) talked frequently about America and England having “a special relationship.”* But it wasn’t a relationship of siblings who speak the same language or fight the same war; it went deeper than that, to the point of recognizing contradictions. In pamphlets issued to the British people when 1.3 million American soldiers started arriving in England in 1942, the British Army Bureau of Current Affairs emphasized, “Americans are not Englishmen who are different, but foreigners who are rather like us.”
Today English is the world language, understood by 25 percent of the planet. It is the preferred language of computers (invented in America), the Internet (invented by the U.S. military), and the World Wide Web (invented by an Englishman, now living in America). It is the standard language of international airlines. It is even endorsed by the UN: in 1977 when the Voyager I rocket launched a probe into outer space in search of extraterrestrial life, it carried a welcome from the head of the UN—in English.
There is a basic explanation for this permanence. Says one British philologist:
Our language and literature and our basic philosophy of government developed in parallel: if the English-speaking people have been writing well for over four centuries, the reason is not simply that they wrote in English but that they have had a lot to write about—and could write it, generally speaking, with relatively little interference from government or anyone else.
1816 In 1807, Gouverneur Morris, U.S. ambassador to France and writer of the final draft of the Constitution, returned to his landed estate in New York. Never one lacking for ladies, he shocked his friends by settling down and getting married in 1809, at the age of fifty-seven. His choice of a wife, moreover, was even more startling: Nancy Randolph, a young Virginia girl who had been seduced by a brother-in-law and accused of murdering her baby, saved from hanging only by the eloquence of Patrick Henry and his fellow member of the legal “dream team,” future chief justice John Marshall. To make ends meet, she was running a boardinghouse in New York City when she was suddenly swooped up and transformed into a lady of one of America’s largest manors. But the marriage was a happy one, and upon his death in 1816, Gouverneur Morris left behind one of the most marvelous testimonials of a man’s love for a woman. His will stated that she was to receive an ample income for life, and that if she remarried the income should be doubled.*
1880 Until recently, very few black Americans cared about Africa. If anything, they wanted to forget it. When emancipated blacks after the Civil War chose their last names, they chose American names like Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson—not African names.
The three most influential blacks in American history had definite views as to their real home. “No one idea has given rise to more oppression and persecution toward the colored people of this country,” wrote Frederick Douglass in 1880, “than that which makes Africa, not America, their home. It is that wolfish idea that elbows us off the sidewalk, and denies us the rights of citizenship.” Added W. E. B. Du Bois, “Neither my father nor my father’s father ever saw Africa or knew its meaning or cared overmuch for it.”
“The Negro is an American,” said Martin Luther King Jr., many years later. “We know nothing of Africa.”
Neither, for that matter, did the early black slaves who first came to America—other than their local villages. The irony of the Afro-American identity movement on college campuses today is its severe misreading of history. The Africa they claim would be greeted with a quizzical look by their great-great-great-grandfathers. Were the two generations to get together for dinner, one suspects neither would understand what the other was talking about.
The African continent, since 1400, had been the world center for slavery, with African kings selling slaves to the Middle East and, to a lesser degree, Europe. In northern and northeastern Africa, Islamic wars led to much bloodshed and selling of prisoners for booty. By selling off the male members of a defeated tribe into slavery, the victorious tribe could be better assured of security.
A trading network of African middlemen developed, to meet the availability and demand for slaves. When the demand from America created a large new market, European and American ship captains found coastal African chiefs ready and willing to supply slaves by raiding the interior and bringing back prisoners for sale. Because of the enormous demand, it was not easy: ship captains would take anywhere from one hundred to two hundred days scouring the coast for traders who had enough slaves to fill up the ship. The trading system was a well-organized network of agents and rules: the African coastal traders had to pay tribute to their local king based on the number of bodies seized from the interior. When America ceased to be a market after the 1860s, African trade continued serving other markets in northern Africa and the Middle East.
The whole issue of “black slavery of blacks” is a troublesome one: how could blacks have carried on slave-trading after others had abolished the practice? The answer is simple, and quite similar to the Europeans’ experience, though it took longer to take hold. In Europe beginning in the fifteenth century, there grew the concept that only non-Europeans could be enslaved. Slavery was viewed as a punishment worse than death. Eventually, by the beginning of the 1800s, the European concept expanded to all peoples, and so Britain and other European nations abolished the practice for everybody.
The same logic applied in Africa, but within a different definition of race. Unlike Europe, immunity from enslavement was given only to those who belonged to one’s own tribe or nation; blacks did not view themselves as “Africans.” Rather, they were members of a tribe. Says the late Harvard historian Nathan Huggins:
The twentieth-century Western mind is frozen by the horror of men selling and buying others as slaves and even more stunned at the irony of black men serving as agents for the enslavement of blacks to whites….African merchants saw themselves as selling people other than their own. The distinctions of tribe were more real to them than race.
Adds the Afro-American intellectual Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University:
Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.
Even in America up to the Civil War, many free blacks had black slaves. A black in America today is not necessarily a soul brother of a fellow black. Were he to examine his roots, he might find his soul brother to have been his enslaver.
1885 This was the year of Huckleberry Finn, acclaimed by Ernest Hemingway as America’s greatest novel: “All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain. It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
When it came out, however, Huckleberry Finn was savaged by critics, to the point that it was banned by the Concord, Massachusetts, public library as “trash … suitable only for slums.” Fortunately the library ban heightened public curiosity about the book and increased the book’s sales dramatically. “They have expelled Huck from their library as ‘trash,’” retorted Twain. “That will sell 25,000 for us, sure.”*
Public libraries weren’t the only ones to censor free speech. In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a famous address to the Harvard Divinity School that renounced organized Christianity in favor of personal revelation; he was not invited to speak at Harvard again for thirty years.
Subsequent books banned in America after Huckleberry Finn included not only books of the far right or the far left, but also mainstream books like the American Heritage Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary (Seventh Edition), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Foreign works that felt the censor’s wrath included Boccaccio’s Decameron, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. During World War II, the government forbade the military from distributing any news or books “containing political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of [a federal] election.” Also banned by the U.S. Army was The Republic by Plato, a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Beard’s books on American constitutional government. In 1982 James Bamford published a book on the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace, drawing upon reams of publicly available information. The book became a celebrity, and even made the cover of Newsweek. The NSA was not so amused, however, and tried to stop publication of Bamford’s book. The book’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, refused. The Puzzle Palace, wrote Bamford, “is the only book in history to have been totally unclassified as it was being written, yet top secret by the time it was published.”
Children’s books under the gun included Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Mother Goose, and Tarzan. Even Robin Hood was banned: the story of a man who took from the rich and gave to the poor—obviously a Communist.
Today, with the rise of “political correctness” on college campuses, book-banning has reemerged from its hibernation since the 1950s. Gone are the Communists, as are the various racial and ethnic minorities who feel offended by characterizations in certain books and want these books eradicated. Today, Huckleberry Finn is under a new attack: racism. A number of Afro-Americans now accuse America’s greatest novel of depicting their race in an unfavorable light, not because of what it says about them, but because they only play a minor role in the book’s lineup of major characters. Such is the treatment of great literature in today’s ideological wars.
Anybody who doesn’t think censorship hasn’t returned to America need only look at the curious case of Gore Vidal. One of America’s most prolific authors since 1946, with some twenty-five books and five hundred essays and magazine articles to his credit, Vidal needed only scribble in his sleep and book publishers would line up at the door. At least that’s the way it used to be, until 9/11.
Many people blame the Patriot Act for the recent fear of censorship. Actually, the problem began with Bill Clinton, not Bush. Sensitive to being soft on military matters, Clinton had responded to Osama bin Laden by passing an Anti-Terrorism Act that wouldn’t pass a first-year course at Yale Law School, it was so vaguely worded. The act defines as illegal and worthy of punishment any actions that “appear to be intended toward violence or activities which could intimidate or coerce a civilian population; or to influence the policy of a government.”
Influence the policy of government? Aren’t most political speeches and pamphlets written to “coerce the population” or “influence the government”? What else was Samuel Adams doing, stirring up the rebels against the British in 1774?
Gore Vidal’s mistake—if it can be called that—was that he spoke out against the patriotic jingoism of post 9/11 and said some unflattering things about America that later, as the war in Iraq dragged on with no end in sight, seemed fairly reasonable. Vidal’s essay, “September 11, 2001 (A Tuesday),” was turned down by Vanity Fair and The Nation for its “anti-American sentiments.” Both magazines had been longtime supporters of Vidal. Subsequently, Vidal packaged the article with several earlier essays into a book; again, no takers in America. He then turned to a publishing house in Italy, which published it under the title The End of Liberty—Toward a New Totalitarianism. The book was soon translated into twelve different languages and became a European bestseller. Finally a small independent publisher in America took it on, under the title Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated, and it became a U.S. bestseller, as did Vidal’s sequel.
1888 One of America’s most remarkable traits is its enormous amount of private philanthropy, whereby people who have attained great wealth are expected to pay back society by making charitable contributions. No country in the world has produced the foundations America has, nor is the percentage of charitable giving so great. Observed the British politician James Bryce in his 1888 classic, The American Commonwealth, “In works of active beneficence no country has surpassed, perhaps none has equaled the United States.”
The history of American philanthropy reveals not only enormous amounts of money, but remarkable creativity in using it. How money is given away, by setting a powerful example, can be just as important as the amount dispensed. The history of American philanthropy has many wonderful stories. Here are a few for today’s super-rich to ponder, hopefully with a sense of modesty and humility.
Andrew Carnegie gave enormous gifts for schools and libraries. His most interesting gift, however, is a little-known one, for the simple reason that it was rejected by the president of the United States and so never saw the light of day. At the end of the 1898 Spanish-American War, many luminaries such as presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, ex-president Grover Cleveland, Henry Adams, and Mark Twain were appalled at the prospect of the United States hanging on to the Philippines after “liberating” it from Spain and paying Spain $20 million in compensation. Equally appalled was Andrew Carnegie. “Is it possible that the American republic is to be placed in the position of the suppressor of the Philippine struggle for independence?” Carnegie asked. Backing his words with deeds, he went to President William McKinley and offered to reimburse the U.S. its $20 million in return for Filipino independence. Carnegie was turned down, and so America embarked on a futile guerrilla war costing hundreds of American lives and ending with ten thousand Filipinos dead.
Nathan Straus was a Russian immigrant who founded Macy’s, the world’s largest department store. But his true passion was children’s health: for more than twenty years he financed milk stations so that needy children could get pasteurized milk, and saved the lives of almost 450,000 children. Observed Admiral George Dewey, “If all the little children whose lives Straus saved could mass themselves … he would have the most splendid memorial ever made to man.” Straus died a bachelor in 1931, leaving an estate of only $1 million.
That’s all that was left of his great fortune. His will stated, “What you give for the cause of charity in health is gold, what you give in sickness is silver, and what you give in death is lead.” In believing that the true philanthropist should give away his money while alive, Nathan Straus was following a particularly American view of philanthropy.
Spurred on by money-hungry universities, many wealthy people leave money to their alma mater with their name emblazoned on a building—but it didn’t used to be that way.
Fascinated by the system of “residential colleges” at Oxford and Cambridge as a solution to making large universities more egalitarian and personal for students, Edward Harkness approached his alma mater, Yale, in 1928 and offered to bankroll a transformation of the campus. Yale dithered, so Harkness went to archrival Harvard—and got an acceptance “in ten seconds.” Two years later Harkness and the Harvard president were touring the first two of the Harvard “houses” now completed, and Harkness asked that one of them be named Lowell House in appreciation of the Harvard president’s support. “Certainly,” said Abbott Lawrence Lowell, “if you will allow another to be named after you.”
It was a major miscalculation. “He dropped my arm,” recalled Lowell, “and moved away almost as if I had suggested a crime.” A year later all seven houses were completed, none of them named for their gentleman benefactor. When Yale, embarrassed at Harvard’s good fortune, asked Harkness to reconsider, Harkness forgave his alma mater and bankrolled a similar project for Yale.
Julius Rosenwald, the chief executive who built up Sears Roebuck, gave away $63 million to charity before he died in 1932. Rosenwald was very clever in the way he gave away his money for five thousand schools: the schools were for African-Americans in eleven Southern states. His reasoning? Having experienced segregation as a Jew, he knew that the city fathers would never tolerate letting white schools fall behind Rosenwald-funded black schools. The result was increased government funding of white schools, and the betterment of schools everywhere.
Dr. Laszlo Tauber escaped a Nazi concentration camp and arrived in America in 1947 with seven hundred dollars in his pocket. He was never interested in making money; he simply wanted to practice surgery. He dreamed of having his own hospital, so in his spare time he got into the construction business, developing office buildings in Washington DC. He practiced surgery all his life, but he also became the U.S. government’s largest landlord, with a net worth of $1 billion. Upon his death in 2003, Dr. Tauber’s will directed that 20 percent of his estate go to philanthropy and 80 percent to his two children and their children, with the stipulation that they can never touch the capital and can never draw a yearly income greater than that of the president of the United States (currently $400,000). The surplus income, added to the capital, eventually will create one of the world’s largest foundations. Upon the death of the last grandchild, the foundation is to be disbanded and the billions are to be distributed, 25 percent to the governments of Israel and the Netherlands, and 75 percent to the government of the United States, “the land of opportunity.”
1900 It is ironic that the heroic vision of the Wild West we remember today comes to us not from Westerners but from Eastern dudes: Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and Frederic Remington. Roosevelt and Wister were Harvard graduates; Remington a Yale graduate. After extensive sojourns to the West to experience the life of the cowboy, each returned home to do his creative work. Observes the historian David McCullough:
Roosevelt wrote his spirited accounts of roundups and bucking horses at a desk at Sagamore Hill, his twenty-two-room house overlooking Long Island Sound at Oyster Bay. Wister “pegged away” at The Virginian, the first true western in American literature, while escaping a Philadelphia winter in Charleston, South Carolina. Remington produced the great body of his work in a studio built to order on his hill at New Rochelle, from where he, too, could catch a glimpse of Long Island Sound.
If this seems strange, consider that the opportunity to see ourselves as others see us is part of the richness of America’s heritage. Not only the West, but also America itself, has been described best by outsiders: the definitive analysis of early America was written by a Frenchman, the best description of the American commonwealth was written by an Englishman, and the most penetrating analysis of American race relations was written by a Swede. The three outsiders were Alexis de Tocqueville, James Bryce, and Gunnar Myrdal.
Probably no man loved America more than a Frenchman, the Marquis de Lafayette. He not only named his children George Washington and Virginie, but took tons of earth with him back to France so he could be buried in American soil.
1924 America’s most famous sculpture is Mount Rushmore, featuring four presidents. Why those four? According to a tourist brochure put out by the National Park Service, “These four figures symbolize the birth and trials of the first 150 years of the United States.” Actually, when Gutzon Borglum picked his subjects in 1924, he used a different criterion. Three presidents obviously qualified; the fourth president, however, is unlike the other three and was very lucky to make it. To this day, historians dispute the meaning of his inclusion.
How Abraham Lincoln made it, nobody knows. According to Borglum’s widow, Mount Rushmore was intended as a monument to America’s expansion across the continent. Washington as a founder of the republic, Jefferson as the force behind the Louisiana Purchase, and Theodore Roosevelt as the local Badlands cowboy who had become the hero of the expansionist Spanish-American War, were obvious choices.* How did Lincoln make it? The lame excuse offered by Borglum’s widow was that although Lincoln had played no role in the nation’s westward expansion, he had been “the savior of the republic” and kept it from shrinking.
1932 Relations between the president and the press have always been adversarial. Even George Washington felt abused and hounded in his second term, and complained about having to undergo such magnifying-glass scrutiny. Every president has felt this way—with the exception of one. Throughout his tenure, the press made a special effort and displayed an extraordinary degree of courtesy and consideration for his physical handicap.
Have you ever wondered why all photos of FDR show him sitting down or show just the upper part of his body? FDR was a cripple, prevented by polio from ever walking again. According to his grandson Curtis Roosevelt, every day for twenty-four years he “could not get out of bed, get dressed, reach the bathroom or get to his desk without the assistance of another person and a wheelchair.” But he wanted no mention of his disability, “particularly any comment that conveyed sympathy. ‘Sob stuff,’ he called it. He was very much of the stiff upper lip tradition.”
The press tacitly agreed not to embarrass the helpless president by photographing him in an awkward physical effort; the dignity of the man and the office must be preserved. He wanted no pictures of him holding on to other people for support; only photographs taken after he had reached a chair and sat down were allowed. For many Americans, the first inkling they had of the severity of their leader’s infirmity was when they saw him hobbling his way on crutches, with aides on both sides, up to the podium to give his first inaugural speech. No photograph was ever printed (one photo was taken; it remained in library archives until recently).
Today, FDR is part of today’s cultural wars, with many advocates complaining that the new FDR Memorial fails to highlight his disability. Said a USA Today editorial, “The galleries contain not one reference to FDR’s greatest feat: achieving all that he did while battling the paralysis of polio….That’s wrong. Roosevelt’s disability is part of his history.”
That may be true today, but it was not then. Says another grandson, David Roosevelt, “FDR guarded his condition closely.” Not that FDR was ashamed of it in any way; he simply believed he had to hide his disability to become president and that being recognized as a cripple would diminish his image as a strong wartime leader. He would disagree with today’s revisionists who claim his disability was “his greatest feat.” For him, it was of secondary importance.
In 1942 Winston Churchill visited the president at Hyde Park. The president took his guest out for a drive. Because FDR couldn’t use his feet on the brake, clutch, or accelerator, he had a car equipped with an ingenious arrangement that enabled him to do everything with his hands. Driving his car with only one hand on its special controls, the president took his visitor on a high-speed spin through the winding forests along the Hudson River. Churchill was terrified. “Don’t worry,” teased the president, “just feel my biceps.” Churchill puts his hands around FDR’s upper right arm, and agreed FDR had the arms of a boxing champion.
Yet nobody suggests that for an FDR memorial.
1935 Built during the Depression, it is one of America’s greatest engineering marvels and major tourist attractions today. Standing sixty stories high, it was built with no prior model for its design—except that it would have to support 45,000 pounds per square foot. “Theories of stress and strain had never before been applied to such immense force.”
The tourist attraction is Hoover Dam, twenty miles outside of Las Vegas. Consisting of 66 million tons of concrete (almost as much as all of the twentieth century’s previous projects built by the Bureau of Reclamation), and designed as a horizontal curved arch facing upstream (rather than a flat embankment), Hoover Dam has withstood earthquakes and water pressure admirably. The biggest problem in building the dam was trying to pour large amounts of concrete into blocks that would remain stable (the interaction of water, crushed stone, sand, and cement causes wet cement to expand, and then contract as it dries). The dam’s size and weight would generate pressures and mass that would heat the concrete to 130 degrees, making the material unstable. “Though the dam would appear solid, it would be, in reality, a pyramid of warm pudding.” The engineers therefore devised an ingenious plan to cool the blocks evenly by circulating ice water through a series of one-inch pipes. By lowering the temperature to 43 degrees near the base and 72 degrees near the crest, the engineers cut down the cooling time from one hundred years to a miraculous twenty months.
After its victory at the Coral Sea in 1942, the Japanese navy looked to wipe out the American navy in the Pacific once and for all. The next battleground was Midway Island. They had every reason to be confident. The U.S. Navy, crippled after Pearl Harbor, had been beaten badly at the Coral Sea, losing many ships, including its mighty aircraft carrier Yorktown.
Except the Yorktown had not sunk. Instead, it had managed to stay afloat and limp back to Pearl Harbor, where American engineers stared in horror and predicted a three-to-six-month repair job to make her seaworthy. Admiral Chester Nimitz had other ideas. He ordered the ship to be refitted immediately to rejoin the fleet already headed to Midway. Observed the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison:
Over 1,400 men—shipfitters, shipwrights, machinists, welders, electricians—poured in, over and under the ship; they and the yard shopmen worked in shifts the rest of the day and the next and during the whole of two nights, making the bulkhead stanchions and deck plates necessary to restore the ship’s structural strength, and replacing the wiring, instruments and fixtures damaged in the blast.
Less than sixty-eight hours later, Yorktown left drydock and headed off to Midway, where its squadrons succeeded in sinking several Japanese aircraft carriers and its firepower attracted the entire Japanese counteroffensive away from the carriers Enterprise and Hornet, whose firepower won this pivotal battle of the Pacific. Yorktown itself sank, but its very existence on the battle scene—thanks to a miraculous sixty-eight hours by American engineers, maintenance technicians, fabricators, and riveters—made victory possible and demonstrated the importance in war of individual initiative all the way down the line from the commander to the lowest worker.
Enter Henry J. Kaiser, the great industrialist of the twentieth century, as George Westinghouse was of the nineteenth: a human dynamo who never stopped and always maintained superb labor relations. Head of the construction consortium that had built the Hoover, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee dams, Kaiser had gone to the White House and told FDR he could build all the ships the country needed to fight World War II. FDR, a former Secretary of the Navy, knew full well Kaiser hadn’t an iota of shipbuilding experience. But he was so mesmerized by the man’s gall that he threw him a bone: build fifty ships. Kaiser went into high gear.
“Hurry-Up Henry” ended up building 1,383 ships. The first ship took one hundred days to build; “I’ll do better,” swore Kaiser. Applying assembly-line methods to shipbuilding—though building a ship of thirty thousand components is a lot more complicated than building a car—Kaiser worked incessantly to speed up the process to the point that he set a record of four days and fifteen hours to make a freighter from start to finish (the paint was still wet). His average time to build a ship was forty days. It was probably the most impressive heavy-engineering feat of all time. Kaiser achieved it by applying new methods: making ships in prefab sections, and welding them together (instead of using the traditional method of rivets). An additional benefit of this method was that welding was faster and less laborious, meaning that Kaiser could hire women to make up for the labor shortage caused by so many men sent overseas in uniform. By 1944, 18 percent of Kaiser’s workers—almost all of whom had never worked in a shipyard before—were women.
“The fortunes of war were tied to these ships,” it was widely acknowledged. To fight a world war that never touched its shores, the United States had to transport everything across an ocean: troops, food, planes, tanks, landing craft, airfield equipment, guns, ammunition, and fuel. Plus, with the U-boats having a field day in the North Atlantic, there was the attrition rate to worry about. The United States needed more than just lots of ships, it needed them “like, yesterday.” American shipbuilding skyrocketed from 1.1 million deadweight tons to 8 million in 1942 to 19.2 million in 1943. Only then was it clear that the American shipbuilding program had exceeded the attrition gap caused by U-boat sinkings, making victory a matter of time.
The propaganda value of Kaiser’s frenetic shipbuilding feat was enormous. Press and radio headlines all across America trumpeted the launching of every new Liberty ship, and gave Americans hope and pride. Henry Kaiser became so widely admired that FDR even considered him a potential running mate in 1944. By the time the war was over, Kaiser and other shipbuilders had built some 5,500 ships for the U.S. Merchant Marine. It was truly a national effort, “the handiwork of farmers, shopkeepers, housewives, and workers recruited from every walk of life.”
1944 America has had many families with money, and other families who were aristocratic in terms of style and “class,” but only one such combined family that produced a president of the United States. Most remarkably, this wealthy and aristocratic family produced two presidents, one from each party. And two Medal of Honor winners.
Like other moneyed families that have good taste, the Roosevelts did not flaunt their wealth. They did not live like the Vanderbilts in palatial Fifth Avenue houses or in so-called Newport “cottages.” The entourage of Theodore Roosevelt’s brothers and sisters lived in small brownstone houses in Union Square and later on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, while the Franklin Roosevelt clan all lived in the farming countryside of Hyde Park upstate on the Hudson River. They lived well. Both future presidents led rarefied childhoods. Franklin was raised by a dominating mother who kept him in curls and dresses until he was six, and forbade him to play with the village children. “The local children touched their hats to him as if he were an English lord.” Theodore, too, led an unusual life. In describing himself, he stressed his genealogy: “I was born in New York, October 27, 1858; my father of old Dutch Knickerbocker stock; my mother was a Georgian, descended from the revolutionary Governor Bullock.” Until age seventeen, he never went to school—he was taught by private tutors, and twice he went on a year-long Grand Tour with his family, one through Europe, the second through the Mediterranean and Palestine. When he enrolled at Harvard, his oldest sister went up to Cambridge to rent him a luxury apartment (the entire second floor of a house), and spent weeks decorating it with imported furniture and hand-sewn lace curtains to make him feel “at home.” No humble dorm room for this fellow. Living in a neighborhood called “the Gold Coast” was fine. Likewise, when Franklin enrolled at Harvard, his mother moved to Cambridge with him to ensure that her son would be living in a comfortable lifestyle, financed by her father, Warren Delano, a giant in the China opium trade. Whenever Theodore or Franklin took a vacation abroad, or moved from one city to another, such movements were duly noted in the Social Register, the registry of America’s leading “old” families. (But, of course, the drying out of their alcoholic brothers and cousins was not recorded.)
Their wealth, though not enormous, was substantial. Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and sisters spent half their time visiting relatives and friends and traveling through Europe in private railroad cars. Theodore Roosevelt could squander much of his inheritance on illiquid investments such as property in the Dakota Badlands. When Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt married in 1905, their annual unearned income in present-day dollars amounted to almost $250,000, virtually tax-free—plus all their major expenses (their first home and their five sons’ private education) were paid separately, by Franklin’s mother.
Yet it was these two men “born with silver spoons in their mouths” who turned out to be our most populist presidents: Theodore attacking corporate monopolies and “malefactors of ill-found wealth,” and Franklin instituting the New Deal.
Then there’s the story of His Father’s Son.
When Theodore Roosevelt was growing up, he would see his father leave the house after Sunday dinner and walk over to the Newsboys Lodging House to give moral and financial support to the orphaned boys trying to survive by selling newspapers on the streets of New York. Many years later, living in the White House, he met one of those newsboys—who had since become very successful. The president was thrilled to be saluted by this former newsboy who told him, “I am so pleased to meet you,” not as president of the United States, but “as the son of your father.”
In a magazine article in 1900, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “What we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man.” Such a son, after making a small fortune on Wall Street, volunteered for service in World War I, became the youngest regimental commander and was awarded the Distinguished Silver Cross and the Silver Star. After the war he founded the American Legion and became assistant secretary of the Navy. Defeated for the governorship of New York, he was appointed by President Taft to serve as governor of Puerto Rico. When a banking crisis hit the island, he did one of the most remarkable things ever done by an American consul: he reached into his own pocket and posted a $100,000 personal guarantee to successfully stop a run on the Puerto Rican banks.
When World War II came, he petitioned to return to active duty as a colonel. Despite his poor sight, fibrillating heart, and arthritis so bad he needed a cane to hobble around, he was accepted and became one of the few fighting generals in the entire army. Promoted to brigadier general after distinguished service in North Africa and Sicily, he begged to command the initial charge of the D-Day invasion. Knowing this man was not one to sit back in the rear and would put himself in the line of fire, his commanding superior voiced hesitation.
“I am Theodore Roosevelt’s son!” the man shouted. Knowing the emotional power of a president’s son fighting in the middle of his troops, the commander relented, and so the brigadier general got his wish. He led the charge, and for the full day of fighting, was everywhere exhorting his men. “The bravest soldier I ever knew,” said General George Patton. Exhausted by the victorious battle, his heart gave out and he died two days later and was buried at Normandy. Six months later he was awarded the Medal of Honor. Asked to name the most impressive exploit he had ever seen in war, General Omar Bradley said: “Theodore Roosevelt Jr. at Utah Beach.”
Wrote A. J. Liebling, “Theodore Roosevelt had been a dilettante soldier and first-class politician; his son had been a dilettante politician and a first-class soldier.” In 2001 the father also received the Medal of Honor posthumously (for his famous charge up San Juan Hill). Like son, like father.
2000 When Al Gore won the 2000 election popular vote and was trying to get a Florida recount, he said, “What is at stake here is the integrity of our democracy, making sure that the will of the people is expressed.” Several months later, before 9/11, President Bush called for a “Century of Democracy” and the freeing of “captive nations” from dictatorship. In the subsequent war in Iraq, he justified the U.S. presence as “bringing democracy to the Middle East.”
Lofty language indeed, if only it were true. Since both a Democratic vice president and a Republican president do not seem to know their basic History 101, despite their Ivy League educations, there is a possibility some readers of this book may be equally misinformed.
The United States is not a democracy, never was, and never was intended to be. It is a republic. The Founding Fathers were very explicit about this. Said Alexander Hamilton, “We are now forming a Republican form of government. Real liberty is not found in the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments. If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy, or some other form of dictatorship.” Warned Thomas Jefferson (who rarely agreed with Hamilton on anything, but he did here), “The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.”
Jefferson and Hamilton certainly had good theory to go on. According to the historian Carl Vipperman:
Because democracy created the kind of system in which numerical majorities exercised power without taking into account differentiations between groups within the body politic and consequently judged the validity of one measure or another on the assumption that the interests of all citizens were basically the same, Aristotle rejected democracy in favor of a balanced distribution of power among constituent elements of society.
As the current battle between the majority Shiites and the minority Sunnis in Iraq demonstrates, the most difficult part of forming a stable government is protecting the rights of the minority. Dictatorship is rule by one man, democracy is rule by the masses (i.e., the mob). To ensure that the country would not descend into monarchy or mobocracy, the Founding Fathers inserted safeguards against direct election; major checks and balances included a tripartite system of government, the Bill of Rights, and the Electoral College (to give greater weight to the small states). The United States, said Benjamin Franklin, “is a republic, if you can keep it.” Said John Adams, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.”
The French had a revolution, too—just a few years after ours. But unlike the United States, they quickly descended into a reign of terror by the majority Jacobins. In two hundred years since, they have had one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. Not exactly a good track record for a “democracy.”
No one doubts for a moment that the current American effort to spread democracy in the Middle East is a worthwhile goal. But when Afghan president Hamid Karzai said “We are committed to the democratic process in Afghanistan,” one wishes—“prays” may be a better word—that the political pabulum of democracy would not subvert the need for an underlying constitutional republic.
* Alas, independence wasn’t the only topic on people’s minds. From Maine all the way down to Georgia, smallpox was a major scare. In Boston the day before the declaration, the hot topic of gossip was the citywide campaign of inoculation compelling people to deliberately infect themselves with a small dose of smallpox to produce immunity.
* His parents got engaged three days after they met-certainly setting the record for Anglo-American affinity.
* As it turned out, she never did; she died twenty-one years later, a widow.
* He was wrong. It sold 50,000 copies.
* Other candidates, more fitting than Lincoln, would have been Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Polk.