Read American History Revised Online
Authors: Jr. Seymour Morris
American History Revised (27 page)
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: