YDS: The Clare Spark Blog

April 26, 2012

Responding to neo-isolationists

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Illustrated: Theo Van Gogh, assassinated filmmaker, as seen in Amsterdam Museum slide show

What follows is a guest blog by Phillip Smyth,  journalist and researcher. His work has appeared in The American Spectator, The Daily Caller, Haaretz, Middle East Review of International Affairs, and PJ Media.

Phillip Smyth

Lately, the terms “noninterventionism” and “isolationism” have been thrown around like a baby seal between two rambunctious orcas. The roots of these two terms finding their way back into American political discourse have much to do with the rise and spread of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and his quasi-libertarian ideology.

Often, Paul’s foreign policy is termed “noninterventionism”— A policy that encourages free trade but also encourages the U.S. to abandon military engagements, bases, and engage in a policy of noninterference with any foreign state’s affairs.

However, noninterventionism is little more than a rehashing of isolationist principles. Instead of the promised prosperity and peace, the policy would result in little more than further problems for the United States.

Over a small period of time, I’ve noticed that those followers of what could be termed, neo-isolationism have developed a number of arguments defending their views. They range from the benefits of their strategy for trade, reasons why their ideological belief is not isolationism, attempts to connect “noninterventionism” with America’s founding fathers, together with a revisionist view, supportive of neo-isolationism when dealing with enemies we face today. It’s my hope that through this writing some of these neo-isolationist’s myths will be dispelled.

Isolationism By Any Other Name

Noninterventionism actually finds its roots in libertarian ideology—Namely the work of John Stuart Mill and latter day anarchists operating under the banner of libertarianism–called anarcho-capitalists. Far from being, in the words of Ron Paul, “The Original American Foreign Policy”, this form of isolationism was simply an anarcho-capitalist ideological concept rebranded as “noninterventionism”.

Serving as the ideological godfather for anarcho-capitalist thought, Murray Rothbard was–even before Ron Paul stood on the political stage–an ardent advocate for isolationism. In terms of influence, Rothbard was the most important element in developing the contemporary push for isolationism-as-noninterventionism in the United States.

Rothbard’s influence was particularly heavy on Ron Paul and the set of ideologues that would later come to push neo-isolationism. Rothbard described Paul as, “that rare American, and still rarer politician, who deeply understands and battles for the principles of liberty.” In an obituary Paul wrote for the late Rothbard, Paul felt that, “With his death, all who cherish individual rights and oppose the welfare -warfare state, are  the  poorer…one of the most fascinating human beings I’ve ever met…[A] down-to-earth genius.”

Even today, Paul is proud of his protégé status vis a vis Rothard; hanging  Rothbard’s photograph on his congressional office’s wall and posting quotes from him on his official congressional website.

In 1959 Rothbard wrote an unpublished piece for the National Review entitled, “For A New Isolationism”. In the piece Rothbard proudly proclaims the need for the United States to re-adopt isolationism (especially in military and foreign affairs) but still trade with friend and foe alike:

“The basis of all trade is benefit to both parties. There is no need for the traders to like each other for each to gain by the trade. There is no reason, therefore, why the Communists, even if in charge of most of the world, would not be willing to trade with us, just as they are willing and eager to trade now.”

Rothbard expanded on this further in a 1973 interview:

“[Isolationism is] [i]n other words, complete abstinence from any kind of American military intervention and political and economic intervention… abstinence from government intervention. It was the idea of isolationism. The sneer against isolationism always was that isolationists were parochial, narrow-minded characters who don’t know that there is a world out there and want to hide their heads in the sand. In fact it’s the opposite – the true principle of isolationism is that the government should be isolated, the government should do nothing abroad and people who trade, interchange, and engage in voluntary travel, migration, and so forth should be allowed to peacefully do so. The idea is to isolate the government, not to isolate the country.”

By the early 1980s, Rothbard started placing isolationism in quotes and instead utilized the term “noninterventionism”. Even Rothbard’s wiki-entry for the Ludwig von Mises Institute (the primary think-tank for anarcho-capitalists) sidelines his fervent isolationism, placing it under the header of “noninterventionism”. This tactic was followed up by a number of articles by his ideological allies attempting to disassociate isolationism from noninterventionism. Nevertheless, despite the change of terminology, the main ideas originally set forth by Rothbard were retained.

In essence, Rothbardian isolationism is the same exact policy Ron Paul and other so-called “noninterventionists” propose; A policy of “free trade with all” but sans any form of foreign engagement. Paul states:

“Noninterventionism is not isolationism. Nonintervention simply means America does not interfere militarily, financially, or covertly in the internal affairs of other nations. It does not mean that we isolate ourselves; on the contrary, our founders advocated open trade, travel, communication, and diplomacy with other nations.”

The Founder’s Interventionism

For many neo-isolationists, they believe that America must “return” to a “noninterventionist” foreign policy. Only then will the United States be free from attack, confusing overseas engagements, and see a new prosperity.

Yet, this belief is predicated on a mistaken belief that America’s founding fathers only practiced this foreign policy. Normally, these assertions are backed-up by cherry-picked quotations by the founders.  Perennial favorites include a line from George Washington’s farewell address, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world” and another line from Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural, “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations-entangling alliances with none.”

Writing for The Future of Freedom Foundation, neo-isolationist Gregory Bresiger noted when, “Thomas Jefferson, took office in 1801, he, too, paid homage to Washington’s foreign-policy advice. Jefferson, despite his differences with the Federalists, promised no ‘entangling alliances.’ Isolationism, or non-interventionism, was, for a short time, the established policy of the United States.”

However, Bresiger’s view, along with those of his ideological allies, is largely a myth.

George Washington was hardly a noninterventionist. During the Revolution, Washington and the Continental Congress attempted to incorporate Canada into the United States. When French Canadians didn’t respond to congressional invitations to join the thirteen colonies, Washington opted to militarily conquer the entity.[1]

As president, speaking to his understanding of protecting what were considered American interests (e.g. fear of wide scale slave revolts in the United States), Washington “advanced France $726 million in debt payments and sold arms to the planters” in the French colony of Saint Dominigue (Haiti) in 1791.  Both Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton supported the decision to “interfere” in what many a neo-isolationist would consider a French problem.

In 1823, Founding father James Monroe along with John Quincy Adams, son of founding father and second president John Adams, conceived of The Monroe Doctrine. The Doctrine restricted European powers from influencing or attempting to recolonize either North or South America. To the doctrinaire neo-isolationist, America setting policy for, or extending a security umbrella to South America would be unthinkable.

Thomas Jefferson’s war against Barbary pirates in North Africa is another regularly cited example regarding the anti-isolationism of the founding fathers. Of course, the attack against the Barbary pirates subverted the recognized Ottoman authority over these states, thus breaking a cardinal rule of “nonintervention” for many a neo-isolationist. It also involved America entering into an alliance with Sweden.

However, the additional gritty details of how this war was executed and the very “interventionist” nature of the campaign against the pirates, is often forgotten. Not only did Jefferson go against adopting the isolationist position, he instead opted for a tactic many would ascribe to modern-day leaders: A military coup to gain a strategic ally. Historian John Carter notes Jefferson’s “interventionist” approach:

“…in the summer of 1801 James Cathcart, the U.S. consul to Tripoli, presented Secretary of State James Madison with a proposal to attempt to overthrow the Pasha’s government. As Cathcart explained, his plan called for enlisting the assistance of the Pasha’s older brother and rival for political power, Hamet Karamanli. Hamet was living in exile in the neighboring Barbary State of Tunisia. Cathcart proposed that an American military effort could be masked by Hamet’s participation to appear to be merely a local political uprising. If the action succeeded in replacing the Pasha with his brother, then America would gain an important ally in the Mediterranean region. Cathcart had already instructed the American consul at Tunis, an adventurer named William Eaton, to explore the depth of Hamet Karamanli’s political ambition for the throne of Tripoli as well as to make an assessment of the sort of resources that might be necessary to mount a coup…the administration paid Hamet a stipend of $2000 in 1802…In the end Jefferson settled on a two track diplomatic initiative that employed both a limited use of American naval force in the region and Cathcart’s covert plan for a coup to put Hamet Karamali on the throne.”[2]

Now juxtapose Jefferson’s (and the Seventh U.S. Congress’s) 1801 strategy with comments by Ron Paul about current situations.

Regarding Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, an American ally hardly “installed” by Washington, but supported for the sake of regional stability and furthering American interests:

“[T]hey’re [the Egyptian people] upset with us for propping up that puppet dictator for all those years. Now to add insult to injury, where do you think the money went? To Swiss bank account, that family, the Mubarak family had $40, 50, 60 billion–nobody knows–stashed away in other countries, other areas of your money and that is true.”

In relation to the U.S. War in Afghanistan and the 1953 British and American organized coup in Iran:

“We already hear plans to install and guarantee the next government of Afghanistan…nation building is quite another. Some of our trouble in the Middle East started years ago when our CIA put the Shah in charge of Iran.”

If anything, it would seem that the neo-isolationists are actually out of step with the pragmatic, interest-based, and at times “interventionist” foreign policy established by the founding fathers.

Isolationism & America’s Interests

Pulling American forces out of our numerous overseas bases and engagements is another policy goal for neo-isolationists. Many of these isolationists speculate that if the United States suddenly pulled its forces back from every foreign base and slashed defense budget costs, the global engine of trade would not only keep running, but would actually be kicked into high gear. [3]

However, this ignores historical and contemporary reality. In an piece covering the importance of a strong American military and need for power projection to protect American trade interests, Marion Smith notes, “Their [the neo-isolationists] mistake lies in thinking that commerce and security are separate issues. Nothing could be more at odds with the experience of American statecraft.”

Many neo-isolationists believe American influence on other powers is illegitimate. Yet with the removal of American forces to project power over key players, one of the great checks on stability and conflict would actually be removed.

Take the case of Israel countering Iran’s nuclear program. In the words of Ron Paul, if Israel attacked Iran, “That’s their business, but they should suffer the consequences.” The same concept could be applied to any military action by any state. It’s not America’s business, we should continue trading with both parties, and all will be well.

The fact of the matter is that in our globalized environment with its vast interconnections, it’s not simply “their business”.  Regional actors’ actions would have a direct effect on the U.S. Simply consider the variety of American interests in the Middle East, namely oil. Needless to say, the U.S. is a country reliant on cheap oil and a disruption would be quite costly.

Michael C. Lynch of Strategic Energy and Economic Research, told the NY Times, “If we get some kind of explosion — like an Israeli attack or some local Iranian revolutionary guard decides to take matters in his own hands and attacks a tanker — than we’d see oil prices push up 20 to 25 percent higher and another 50 cents a gallon at the pump”.

The price of oil and gas in the U.S. is often driven by speculation. With the possibility of increased regional war and terrorism, the risk would only grow.  Imagine what a Persian Gulf security vacuum would look like without the American security umbrella, how an empowered OPEC oil cartel might toy with international oil prices, or what emboldened irredentist entities might attempt in the Persian Gulf’s strategic waterways. Certainly, free-trade abroad and economic prosperity at home would be directly altered.

An even bigger question is which powers would take over the U.S. role? Oil starved China? Would there be a litany of small navies often battling one another for hegemony? Anarchic conditions may also exist to the detriment of international trade. One only needs to review how Somali pirates (regularly checked by U.S. and other fleets) plague trade routes.

Many neo-isolationists believe American influence on other powers is illegitimate. Yet with the removal of American forces to project power over key players, one of the great checks on stability and conflict would actually be removed.

Neo-Isolationists & Jihad

Intertwined with the issue of pulling out American forces from many global engagements, is our war against radical Islamism in Afghanistan and across the globe. As witnessed among the Sunni jihadists of al Qaida and the Shia Islamist theocratic regime in Iran, there is no denying that the numerous forms of messianic Islamism exist as coherent ideologies. What is more, is the jihadist worldview, one that it is locked in an existential battle against the United States and the West.[4]

Often, neo-isolationists will pin blame on Islamist attacks against the West by stating they were due to Western occupation. Rothbardian and Ron Paul backer, Professor Walter Block went so far as to say, “Terrorists do not put us in the cross hairs because we have rock music, mini-skirts and freedom.”

Yet time and time again, through Islamist discourse, it can be seen that concerns over military occupation(s) hardly encompass the entire picture. Disgust with Western lifestyles, freedoms, and the denial by many of those living in the West of accepting Islam served as extremely potent motivations for conflict.

In the words of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “So long as the American empire based in the White House has not been overthrown, we have work to do.”

In fact, the very policy of unilateral withdrawal simply emboldens our Islamist enemies. Osama bin Laden himself cited the examples of the U.S. pullout from Beirut (due to a Hizballah bomb attack in 1983) and the Somali “Black Hawk Down” incident of 1993 as proof that Americans were cowardly and needed to be attacked more.

When America pulled its Marines out of Lebanon following the bombing by the Iranian backed Shia Islamist Hizballah, a spate of additional bombings, hijackings, and kidnappings of Westerners and Western targets ensued.

In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh wasn’t assassinated in retaliation for Western occupation, but for “insulting Islam”. Danish cartoonists who depicted pictures of Mohammed with a bomb fashioned to his head were threatened with death. This also resulted in radical Islamists targeting Denmark.  In 2008 Ayman al-Zawahiri, then the number two in al-Qaeda threatened Denmark:

“Denmark has done her utmost to demonstrate her hostility towards the Muslims by repeatedly dishonouring our Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him salvation. I admonish and incite every Muslim who is able to do so to cause damage to Denmark in order to show your support for our Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him salvation, and to defend his esteemed honour. We prefer to live underground [i.e. dead] rather than accepting the limited response of boycotting Danish dairy products and goods.”

One month after the statement, a car bomb exploded outside of Denmark’s embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Eight were killed.

Essentially, the simple and very libertarian exercise of freedom of speech prompted the attacks. These individuals and the very societal norms they embraced were seen as threats by Islamists.

NOTES.

[1]See: Gustave Lanctôt, Canada & the American Revolution, 1774-1783, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1967).

[2] John J. Carter, Covert Operations As A Tool of Presidential Foreign Policy In American History From 1800 To 1920: Foreign Policy In The Shadows, (New York, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), P.23.

[3] Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto, (New York,Grand Central Publishing, 2008), pp. 56-57.

[4] My own article for the Daily Caller has other examples. See: http://dailycaller.com/2011/02/21/ron-pauls-poor-policy-and-poorer-defenders/

December 10, 2011

Before Saul Alinsky: Rules for Democratic Politicians

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Claude Bowers

This blog is about Democratic Party fundamentalism as expressed by the populist journalist Claude Bowers, keynote speaker at the Democratic Convention of 1928. The Democratic essentials had already been revealed in Obama’s speech at Osawatomie, Kansas on December 8, 2011, but I had never heard of Bowers, a Hoosier journalist, politician, and later ambassador to Spain and Chile, before reading about his role in the ascendance of Jeffersonianism and the concurrent stigmatizing of Alexander Hamilton in the early 20th century. (My source was Stephen F. Knott’s Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth.) Since Knott had mentioned Bowers’ memoir and his racist elevation of Andrew Johnson in the bestselling Tragic Era (1929),* and since I had never heard of him before, I consulted his memoir. I was not prepared for this inside story of Democratic politics, nor the starring role that this autodidact had played in publicizing not only the Jefferson-Jackson contribution to populist ideology, but in delegitimating such Radical Republicans as Thaddeus Stevens and the whole Reconstruction [gang]. This hatred would be transferred to “the money power” and the ostensible Republican “oligarchy” that had viciously exploited the suffering masses, masses who Bowers was calling to arms, as indeed Obama had done in his New-New  Nationalism peroration.

The first thing I noticed in the Bowers memoir was his excitement in vivid Irish oratory and the theater of politics, also by the Leader principle, for his book is full of hero-worship and the language of military battle, replete with violent metaphors. Then I came upon his speech, delivered to the most powerful Democratic partisans during the election year 1928, and the word protofascist came to mind. So I am copying out his own transcription of the rules for fighting Democrats that are in many ways, indistinguishable from the rhetoric of communists, fascists, and the most militant of social democrats (including POTUS). (This speech was meant to unify a dangerously splintered Party, divided about such issues as evolution and Al Smith’s Catholicism, but also fatally defeatist, in Bowers’s view. In his memoir, he places his speech to the Jackson Day Banquet of 1928 after a description of a pleasant meeting with FDR, at that time an adviser to Al  Smith. This is not his keynote address at the 1928 convention: that one sharply divided Hamiltonian Republicans from Lincoln Republicans, thus annexing Lincoln to the politics and policies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and consigning the Hamiltonians to hell/the “penitentiary.” Bowers viewed his accomplishment as banishing forever the false notion that party differences were merely about patronage, as opposed to [class struggle].)

[Claude Bowers, as reprinted in My Life (Simon and Schuster, 1962):]

“[Referring to Andrew Jackson as exemplary Jeffersonian democrat:] He was too wise to enter a conflict with enemies, spies and traitors in the rear.

He had no patience with the timid or the time server, and the ordered the Miss Nancys and the Sister Sues back with the scullions and the cooks to make way for two-fisted fighting men upon the firing line.

His strategy of battle was to center on a single issue, brush all extraneous matters out of the line of march, and, the strategy determined, close debate and concentrate on victory.

Imagine, if you can, an Iago insinuating himself into Jackson’s camp to propose the division of the party on evolution or the theory of relativity and living to report progress to the enemy that sent him.

He never fought with ping-pong sticks—he gave his men battle axes and artillery.

He never soft-pedaled his approach to conflict—he rode to battle waving a warrior’s sword and shouting commands, and he rode at the head of the column.

He never inquired whether a policy would be good for the North, South, East, or West, for he knew if it were really good it would be good for the masses of the people everywhere.

He fought the common enemy; he waged no civil wars.

Under his courageous leadership, the jingle of the golden coin could not intimidate the army that he led, and the enemy barricades could not stop it, and the machinations of the enemy could not divide it, and thus he moved to inevitable and immortal victories for popular government and the economic rights of man.

And how did he do it? By giving the people a fundamental issue that had a meaning at every fireside in every home in the country. He pointed to the entrenchments of monopoly [i.e, the National Bank, CS] and he said, “We will take that.” He called attention to the increasing arrogance of class rule, and he asked the masses to follow him to battle for the restoration of a government of equal rights for all and special privileges for none.

….

[Bowers, cont.] But someone asks what Jefferson and Jackson have to do with present-day problems and conditions; and the answer is that there is scarcely a domestic issue that Jefferson thought for and Jackson fought for and Wilson wrought for that is not a vital living issue at this hour.

If the party that these men stood for stands today where these men stood, for equal rights for all and special privileges for none—there is an issue.

If it stands where these men stood, against monopoly and autocracy in government and industry—there is an issue.

If it stands where these men placed it, for the rule of the majority and the greatest good to the greatest number—there is an issue.

If it believes, as these men did, that the debaucher of the ballot box and the hucksters in high places who sell the nation’s birthright to line their pockets belong to the penitentiary and nowhere else—there is an issue.

And to put it all in one sentence: If it stands where these men stood, for democracy and against the oligarchy of a privileged class—there, there is an issue that can mobilize the people and make them march with waving banners and the will to victory in their hearts.” (pp. 178-180) [End, Bowers excerpt]

[Clare’s comment:] Earlier in the text, Bowers mentioned Jefferson’s beloved household servant, too reticent, perhaps, to name the servant as a slave. So much for Jeffersonian or Jacksonian democracy, models that are supposed to speak to us today, red banners waving. Obviously, the entire gold-jingling, huckster-ridden Republican party should be hunted down and jailed. So much for popular sovereignty: we don’t need any. The Leader and the masses are joined at the hip.

*The Tragic Era is notorious in the annals of apologetics for white supremacy. It was favorably reviewed by William E. Dodd (see my remarks on Dodd’s Southern agrarianism in http://clarespark.com/2011/08/14/review-in-the-garden-of-beasts-by-erik-larson/ . Peter Novick in That Noble Dream, p.231, states that Bowers’s achievement in discrediting the Republican Party in the South was awarded with the ambassadorship to Spain. Novick doesn’t mention that it was FDR’s appointment that sent Bowers off to a Spain he romanticized in his autobiography.

November 5, 2010

Hamburger’s Separation of Church and State

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Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law, Columbia U. Law School

Before reading this blog, I ask the reader to examine two separate accounts of Philip Hamburger’s book.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B02E6D61131F935A35754C0A9649C8B63 (Peter Steinfels reviews Hamburger, 2002 in NYT.)

http://www.law.columbia.edu/media_inquiries/news_events/2007/December07/hamb_profile.  (Columbia Law School describes the controversy over Hamburger’s book., December 2007 issue of Columbia Law School Magazine.)

[My blog:]    In the conclusion to his 492 page study, Separation of Church and State, the author instructively contrasts two clashing visions of “liberty” (though not in terms that a libertarian would recognize). These paragraphs would seem to identify him as a neutral party to the culture wars (traditionalism versus secularism) that have inflamed the republic longer than we might think. I quote his paragraphs, then lay out the strange associations and claims that this Harvard-published book maintains.

[Hamburger, p. 485:]…[Summarizing Tocqueville] By inculcating morals, by encouraging mutual love and forgiveness, and by directing ambitions toward another world, religion could diminish injurious behavior, dissension, and distrust. Accordingly, it could reduce the necessity of civil coercion—a necessity that might otherwise lead a people to desire harsh or even tyrannical government. Religion could also establish a lasting foundation in public opinion for the various rights that seemed particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in popular sentiments. It thereby could temper the selfish passions and oppression to which republics were all too prone. Thus religion—specifically the Christianity inherited and shared by a community—seemed essential for the preservation of liberty.

[Hamburger, cont., p.485:]    Increasingly , however, this perspective coexisted with another, very different point of view, drawn from European experiences and fears—a perspective that survives most prominently in the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Together with expanding numbers of other Americans, Jefferson feared that clergymen, creeds, and therefore most churches undermined the inclination and ability of individuals to think for themselves. He worried that individuals would defer to their church’s clergy and creed in a way that would render them subservient to a hierarchy and would deprive them of intellectual independence. In such ways, the clerical and creedal religion of most churches appeared to threaten the individual equality and mental freedom that Jefferson increasingly understood to be essential for the citizens of a republic.

[Clare:] One might think from these excerpts from the chapter entitled “Conclusions” that the author had actually set up throughout his lengthy text discussions of Toqueville and Jefferson. But he had not. Rather, he created a genealogy for “American identity” that conflated his secularists with Roger Williams (unconscionably insulted and dismissed in the brief pages on his pathbreaking religion and politics); with Republican Jefferson’s political ambitions in the campaign of 1800 (in which he determined to defeat statist Federalists); with viciously anti-Catholic, anti-working class Protestants who forced compulsory free public education down our throats; with Know-Nothings, “Liberals,”“nativists,” “freethinkers”, “white supremacists,” “individualists,” and  “Americanists”; with Reform Jews, including Felix Frankfurter (!); with Unitarians; and most breakthtakingly, with the Ku Klux Klan, spending endless pages on the tricky Klansman SCOTUS Hugo Black and his fiery crosses (crosses that the author linked to the Statue of Liberty).

  I try not to be paranoid, but this wild and undisciplined book could be a through-the-looking-glass rewrite of Disraeli’s novel Lothair (1870), in which the author describes an elaborate Catholic plot to lure the fabulously wealthy hero (Lothair) away from Anglicanism, a conspiracy to restore the Pope as the supreme authority in Britain (along with his confiscated lands) that fails in the end. In Hamburger’s drama, however, the (undifferentiated) Catholics are the victims of (undifferentiated) Protestants and their white-sheeted knights.

    Nowhere does the author examine whether or not the “secularists” had any reason to fear authoritarian religion as an obstacle to intellectual independence. Nowhere does he examine the propaganda churned out by elites since antiquity that declared the people incapable of the self-control and community spirit of their betters. Nowhere does he lay out the case law that addressed the (non-existent or illegitimate) separation of church and state. But what is most shocking is that in both of the reviews and summaries of the controversy linked above, what I have written about the iconographic program of this book is utterly absent, like Roger Williams himself, who was the true originator of the notion that church and state should and must be separated, that faith was an entirely private matter of individual conscience. (Herman Melville said the same in a marginal comment in Goethe’s autobiography, and also echoed Williams’s respect for native Americans and his questioning of what was to become the conquest theory of property.)

    Another lacuna in the text is the vexed question of the taxation of Church property. As Keith Thomas wrote long ago in his Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), one reason for the witch-hunts in seventeenth century England might have been this confusion: Who was responsible for charity and the protection of the poor and disabled? Was it to be the state or the church? And to bring Thomas’s  question up to date, if churches, public schools, universities, and non-commercial media are to be ideological weapons of one narrow politics—the crazy-making statist politics of “moderation” (a.k.a. round-the-clock “compromise”)– should taxpayers be asked to support them? Or should they compete in the marketplace of ideas? Hamburger never uses that expression, and I doubt that any Harvard UP editor suggested it to him. The major university presses are firmly committed to self-sacrifice, duty and service to the “community” above creativity and innovation. The “self” has been erased and “laissez-faire capitalism” reduced to a dirty conception.

(For a related blog, see http://clarespark.com/2009/07/04/unfinished-revolutions-and-contested-notions-of-identity/. ) Also http://clarespark.com/2009/11/22/on-literariness-and-the-ethical-state/. It will be clear that Hamburger is an advocate of the “living Constitution” that enhances the “positive state”–i.e., the ethical state. Cf. Mussolini’s Fascism.

August 30, 2010

Growth or Redistribution? excerpt from Third Point LLC letter to investors 8/27/10

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 [To my readers: I am neither an economist nor an economic historian, so I thought that this collage and analysis of where our country is headed under the Obama administration, remarkable for its clarity and forthrightness, would be a welcome addition to the website. I thank Dan Loeb for giving me permission to quote from his letter, the full content of which can be accessed on the internet. Also see the front page of the Business section of the New York Times today, August 31, 2010: http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/sorkin-why-wall-st-is-deserting-obama/?scp=1&sq=Daniel%20Loeb&st=cse]

Daniel S. Loeb

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

– Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 1801

 A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.

– Thomas Jefferson, Writings, 1743-1826

 I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of the people.

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802

 One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

– Ronald Reagan, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdLpem-AAs, 1961

 You know, there’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid-off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this – when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers – it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help.

– Barack Obama, Xavier University Commencement Speech, 2006

 It is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

– Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention Speech, 2004

 I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.

–Barack Obama’s Comments to Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, 2008

The secret of US success is neither Wall Street nor Silicon Valley, but its long-surviving rule of law and the system behind it… American system is said to be “designed by genius and for the operation of the stupid.”

– General Liu Yazhou, Phoenix Magazine, August 2010  

Review and Outlook

As we entered the second quarter of 2010, many measures of confidence and economic activity were showing consistent improvement, leading us to increase our exposures in select undervalued companies which we thought would benefit from a favorable economic environment. Most pundits initially attributed the subsequent turn in the markets and investor sentiment to the Greek crisis, concern over the Euro, the Oil Spill in the Gulf, and vague rumors concerning faltering Chinese growth. However, it is apparent to us that the turning point in both investor and consumer confidence came on April 16th, with the filing of the government’s suit against Goldman Sachs over its mortgage CDO activities. This politically-laced lawsuit was a tipping point for shaky investor confidence against an increasingly worrisome landscape of new laws and proposed regulations that are perceived by many market participants to promote “redistribution” rather than growth, and are contrary to free market ideals.

As every student of American history knows, this country’s core founding principles included non-punitive taxation, Constitutionally-guaranteed protections against persecution of the minority, and an inexorable right of self-determination. Washington has taken actions over the past months like the Goldman suit that seem designed to fracture the populace by pulling capital and power from the hands of some and putting it in the hands of others.

 For example, a well-intentioned government program gone awry is the new CARD Act that restricts banks from repricing interest rates on borrowers who fail to meet their revolving credit obligations. The effect of this legal prohibition has been to force the banks to raise the interest rate paid by all borrowers, to compensate for losses they are now being forced to take on delinquent borrowers. The effect is a redistribution of wealth from people who pay their debts on time to those who do not.

 Laws and regulations such as these justifiably raise questions about this government’s commitment to free-market capitalism and the articulated rule of law. Arguably unconstitutional Bills of Attainder, such as the special “Enterprise Tax” proposed to be levied on hedge fund managers and other managers of private partnerships who wish to sell their management companies (ostensibly in order to extend unemployment benefits beyond the current 99 weeks) send a vivid message that this Administration is operating from a playbook quite different from the one we are used to as American business people; a thought that chills all participants in these free markets.

 On the other hand, it is not hard to understand the source of the popular distrust in capitalism today. Many people see the collapse of the sub-prime markets, along with the failure and subsequent rescue of many banks, as failures of capitalism rather than a result of a vile stew of inept management, unaccountable boards of directors, and overmatched regulators not just asleep, but comatose, at the proverbial switch. When we hear the chorus of former executives and regulators exclaim that the crisis was “impossible to see coming”, while at the same time walking away with millions or going on to greater levels of responsibility in government, it is both puzzling and demoralizing. It is easy to see why so many people have concluded that the entire system is rigged.  

This crisis of trust in our system is not limited to inept executives in regulated financial institutions who bury their shareholders and then walk away with ill-gotten sacks of loot. Having analyzed hundreds of proxy statements from the outside and having had the “pleasure” of sitting on several corporate boards, giving me a chance to walk the sausage factory floor, I have personally witnessed the incompetence of many boards of directors. One can only conclude that the incentive systems put in place for directors reward luck and station more than they do talent, skill or creation of shareholder value.

 Not all boards are bad, of course. Private equity firms have a terrific model of appointing energetic members of their firms and outside experts to oversee the affairs of the companies they govern. They tend to have real “skin in the game”, spend days reviewing strategy and other matters, and have their own staffs to analyze numbers produced by the company. Board fees tend to be irrelevant to the members of such firms as they are keenly focused on strategies to deleverage and to create long/medium term shareholder value. Even some public companies have similarly engaged corporate boards.

 However, many of the boards we have come across are populated by individuals who rely on the stipends they receive from numerous corporate boards and thus appear motivated primarily to ensure continuing board fees, first-class air travel and accommodations, and a steady diet of free corned beef sandwiches until they reach their mandatory retirement age. We are therefore encouraged by the recently finalized proxy rules, which will ease the nomination and election of directors by shareholders.

 All of the above leads us to conclude that America faces not only a crisis of confidence among consumers unwilling to spend and businesspeople unwilling to invest, but also a crisis of leadership. So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire. One can hope only that this Administration, composed of brilliant academics that have had experience in creating the very regulation and overseeing the very institutions that have failed, has learned from its mistakes and will set us down the right path. Perhaps our leaders will awaken to the fact that free market capitalism is the best system to allocate resources and create innovation, growth and jobs. Perhaps they will see the folly of generating greater deficits by “investing” in programs that lead to corruption and distortions of the system.

June 10, 2010

Herman Melville: Dead White Male

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Elizabeth Renker, author of Strike Through The Mask

[This short article summarizes my chief arguments in Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival. It is slightly revised since publication on HNN: www.hnn.us/articles/665html.]

Since the Melville Revival of the 1920s, Moby Dick has become an undisputed classic of world literature and continues to grow in interest, especially this year and last with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Melville’s masterpiece in late 1851. Historians, however, are probably unaware that Herman Melville (1819-1891) and his pathbreaking modernist novels, always the targets of cultural conservatives in both his time and ours, are now the objects of fierce disputes in “the canon wars” that have heated up since the mid-1980s. The literature created by “dead white males” has been challenged by some “multiculturalist” non-whites, feminists, and their allies. Moby Dick has been cited as chief offender, ostensibly crowding out worthy contenders for the attention of undergraduates. Melville himself has been described by such as Elizabeth Renker, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Elizabeth Hardwick, Andrew Delbanco, and others as an abusive husband and father (i.e. as Ahab), though, as my research has shown, there is not a shred of documentary evidence that would justify such attacks on his character. How is this possible?

It is clear that Melville has become a symbol for an essentially imperialist, capitalist, patriarchal, ecocidal America, and his hero Captain Ahab a model of sorts for twentieth-century totalitarian dictators. Such readings by postmodernists have displaced earlier interpretations, some of which viewed Melville as a radical democrat and anti-racist, and Ahab as a nineteenth-century reformer. Other (more conservative) readings hitherto interpreted Ahab as tragic hero, symbol of indomitable humanity, yet doomed to failure in either the search for truth or for amelioration of the human condition. (In my book, I make a case for Ahab as both abolitionist, e.g., Charles Sumner, and modern artist, Melville himself, with the proviso that Ahab and Ishmael are sometimes at odds, sometimes confusingly blended.)

For seventeen years I pursued Melville’s pursuers by consulting the papers of leading Melville critics, some of whose archives were only recently opened. What I found was a tortured record of ambivalent Melville critics, who alternately hugged and repudiated their homme fatale. Institutional affiliations and class allegiance had a decisive effect on their analysis, with the result that Melville, in all his complexity, was not “revived” at all; rather he was diagnosed by jittery scholars as an extremist who wreaked havoc upon his family until he converted to moderation after the instructive blood-letting of the Civil War. Such diagnoses were the inevitable result of 1930s Popular Front culture and the objectives of the upper-class peace movement that followed World War II.

For instance, three of the key Melville critics, Dr. Henry A. Murray (leader in academic psychology and personnel assessment for the Office of Strategic Services, who came to be admired as a father of the New Left), Charles Olson (“father” of cultural pluralism and postmodernism), and Jay Leyda (photographer, film historian, and technical advisor to the film, Mission to Moscow), were skilled propagandists allied with the Roosevelt administration. All three men strongly influenced subsequent Melville scholarship and biography, and they and/or others suppressed primary source materials that conflicted with their political allegiances and recipes for conservative reform. The result was (an ambivalent) witch-hunt directed against “crazy” Melville and his monomaniacal character, Captain Ahab; both of whom were seen as overly skeptical of traditional authority.

The suppressed materials include the following items:

1. Melville’s annotations to Milton’s Paradise Lost, which strongly suggest that Melville identified with Milton’s Satan in his seduction of Eve (Book IX). Like the radical puritan, Milton himself in Melville’s reading, poked his nose into the affairs of his betters. When the annotations surfaced in the early 1980s, these materials were confined to a very few Melvilleans, and when finally published, leading scholars construed their message as evidence for the construction of a sobered-up moderate Melville (see http://clarespark.com/2008/05/03/margoth-vs-robert-e-lee/).

2. Letters from Melville’s descendants in Henry Murray’s papers at Harvard, which were never published. I was the first Melville scholar to see these letters (in 1995), and am persuaded that they would have scotched the rumors, circulated by Murray, Olson and others, that Melville was a wife-beater and a drunk.

3. A family letter (discovered by Olson in 1934, handed over to Murray, and finally published by Amy Puett Emmers in 1978), that suggested Melville had a real-life natural half-sister corresponding to the character Isabel in his quasi-autobiographical novel Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852). The significance of the letter remains extremely controversial but is important because the New Deal social psychologists, in both their social democratic propaganda, and in their attempt to boost public morale as world war loomed, were rehabilitating and idealizing good fathers (conflating Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt)while reinterpreting the libertarianism of  Hamilton, Jefferson and Paine and generally circumscribing dissent. Melville’s “Hebraic” ethical universalism and constant interrogation of illegitimate authority (for instance the apparent exposure of his own father’s abandonment of an illegitimate daughter) were threats to their objective: the good father, as “focus of veneration” was the source of group cohesion in a pluralist society (Murray).

Melville criticism shifted dramatically after the first phase of the Melville Revival in the 1920s. Raymond Weaver, Melville’s first biographer (1921) had identified the Miltonic author with Ahab, and both were viewed as romantic rebels protesting Victorian philistinism and imperialist activity as represented by hypocritical missionaries in such early works as Typee. But between the wars, Melville, though born a Protestant and generally a freethinker, was frequently characterized as a Jew, the archetypal confidence-man, the “Hebraic” character only pretending to be a principled moralist (Murray, Olson, and others). During the postwar phase of the Melville Revival, it was necessary to reconstruct Melville as a “moderate man,” preacher of “virtuous expediency”–precisely the figure who was the target of his most trenchant satire. This shift responded to the perceived need for a centrist ruling coalition that could unite elements of both the prewar Left and Right. Accordingly, leading Melvilleans decisively separated the author from Ahab’s feisty empiricism/romantic individualism and identified him with aristocratic Captain Vere (in Billy Budd), a tendency that had already begun in the late 1930s.

The late 1930s turning point in Ahab readings is traced in my book and seems intertwined with several concurrent developments: an increasing acceptance of the big state (Leviathan: the White Whale) by socially responsible capitalists in the latter phase of the New Deal; the growing antagonism to Hitler as he turned against the West; and a shift from “scientific history” to “cultural history.” The story of the Melville Revival is less obviously intertwined with the history of ongoing antimodern influence on the humanities curriculum. Many of the scholars and critics who were supporting Mussolini and even Hitler during the mid-1930s (e.g. Southern Agrarians), entered the literary establishment as New Critics during and after the war. Definitions of fascism were adjusted accordingly. For some moderates, Hitler was switched from antibourgeois, neoclassical defender of community, to home-wrecking romantic, the autodidact as assassin, as Ahab, as Melville himself. Ex-fascist sympathizers were covering their tracks. This was news to me, and will be so to many historians.

Critics are eager to classify him, to annex a domesticated and pacified artist to their own political projects, not to understand his unresolved ambivalence about the possibilities of a freethinking democratic polity that could lead to mob rule. Hence nervous critics have frequently insisted on making him either an ultraconservative, a centrist, or a left-wing radical, and have managed his biography accordingly. But these categories are too static to describe an unresolved ambivalence or ambiguity that, in my view, continues to characterize politics in this and other industrial democracies. If Melville was worried about the destructive potential of an undereducated and misinformed mob society, so should we all be: in the first edition of Moby-Dick (publ. in England), the novel ends with the Extracts and the Whale Song, confronting the reader with the unresolved question “does Might make Right”? Quite the Brechtian/modernist move.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cain, William E. and Gerald Graff. “Peace Plan for the Canon Wars.” Nation, March 6, 1989, 310-13.

Foerster, Norman, et al. Literary Scholarship: Its Aims and Methods. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941.

Lauter, Paul. “Melville Climbs The Canon.” American Literature (March 1994): 1-24.

Lorant, Laurie Robertson. Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996.

Renker, Elizabeth. “Melville, Wife-Beating, and the Written Page.” American Literature (March 1994): 123-50.

Spanos, Jr., William V. The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.

Spark, Clare. Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001. Paperback revised edition 2006.

Stone, Geoffrey. “Left Wings Over Europe.” American Review 7 (Oct. 1936): 564-85.

Ware, Carolyn F. Introduction. The Cultural Approach to History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940.

Weiss, Philip. “Herman-Neutics.” New York Times Magazine, Dec. 15, 1996, 60-65, 70-72.

May 17, 2010

Beethoven, A Clockwork Orange, and rosy Prometheans

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Beethoven, colored as black by an Afrocentrist

My roses are in hectic bloom and vegetable seeds are sprouting in the back yard.  My cousin Victor Rosenbaum, a concert pianist, was practicing at my house for a concert tonight in a Southern California university, and as I listened to his program of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Chopin, and, given the season, I thought once again of the astonishing flowering of Romantic music during the late 18th and early nineteenth centuries in Europe, the repertoire most favored by my cousin and that continues to beguile my own imagination.  I thought too of some hard things I have said about self-styled “traditionalists” who believe that “secularism” is leading us down the path to perdition.

   Recall the film Clockwork Orange, with a script by Anthony Burgess, and based on his novel, but directed (some say misdirected and botched) by Stanley Kubrick. In the film, the thuggish street urchins who killed at random were seemingly inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.* I was frightened and bewildered when I saw the movie long ago, and disappointed that it was considered to be a triumph of vanguard movie-making by a John Cage-influenced composer teaching at California Institute of the Arts (1971). Today I am not so shocked. The Pelagian-Promethean impulse, though essential to the understanding of such ambivalent writers as Goethe or Herman Melville, is now discredited by leading intellectuals and politicians as Jacobin, or Napoleonic, and leading ineluctably to catastrophic mob rule or the debauched tastes of “mass society.” Also, there is a clear track from the Jacobins to Nazism and Communism in the writing of some other figures on the Right, despite an entirely different genealogy described persuasively by Frank E. Manuel in his The Prophets of Paris (1962): Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Comte.

     I am thinking of some of the traditionalist figures on the Right criticized in prior blogs: Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Newt Gingrich, who claim that our Constitution was God-given and hence not the conscious creation of the Founding Fathers, themselves building upon such prior intellectuals as Spinoza, Montesquieu, or other figures of the European Enlightenment who had theorized a republican form of government. Yet, if one reads the correspondence of John Adams, Abigail Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, it is clear that they viewed their efforts at inventing a republic as experimental.  And like the New England radical Protestants who preceded them, they understood that their efforts would be nil without universal literacy.  Do those influential figures of the Right (mentioned above), while advocating “free will” and “personal responsibility,” diminish the power of human creativity by attributing all of our Constitutional liberties to the will of God? Do our young people even experience European Romanticism and/or the related literary movements described today as realism and naturalism, all of which, with modern technology in the reproduction of great music and literature, had appeal to a larger public than the aristocracy that originally paid for them?

    *Since writing this blog, I read the Burgess novel. It is a tour de force in that Burgess invented a special language for Alex the narrator, drawn from Slavic tongues. After a while, one figures out what the neologisms mean. But the main theme is an attack on all Enlightenment projects that are in any way derived from Rousseau. Like Orwell, Burgess was criticizing the statism and optimism of social democracy (I am using the term loosely), for in his medieval Catholic mentality, the notion that man could be made good and peaceful was a utopian illusion.  Burgess himself was a music lover, and Alex’s delight in Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and other classical composers is probably a hint that Alex represents the daemonic side of Burgess’s own character. One must remember that modern artists could view themselves as the Devil’s minions, for they were usurping priestly authority in their manufacture of imaginary worlds. When Alex is subjected to behavior modification, he is outraged that Beethoven’s Ninth is used in the sound track that accompanies pictures of terrible brutality, hence makes him physically ill until he attempts suicide, injuring his brain and removing the vile associations that made him averse to his prior random brutality. He ends up renouncing his romantic adolescence as he enters adulthood and resolves to find a wife.

April 12, 2010

Multiculturalism/ethnopluralism in the mid-20th century

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[This is a brief excerpt from Hunting Captain Ahab, chapter two, expanding on the mixed-message of progressive ideology and locating the increased deployment of  ethnopluralism to defeat all forms of materialist analysis in the 1940s: ] 

The concept of ethnopluralism could redirect and absorb the class resentments of the potentially explosive redundantly educated–the “disillusioned” worker or petit bourgeois, overtrained (in technology) and underemployed in the Depression, who had been spotted by other conservative intellectuals as shock troops for fascism between the wars. The famous historian Friedrich Meinecke’s postwar explanation for “the German catastrophe” resonates with the ruminations of earlier organic conservatives:[i]

“It often happens nowdays…that young technicians, engineers, and so forth, who have enjoyed an excellent university training as specialists, will completely devote themselves to their calling for ten or fifteen years and without looking either to the right or to the left will try only to be first-rate specialists. But then, in their middle or late thirties, something they have never felt before awakens in them, something that was never really brought to their attention in their education–something that we would call a suppressed metaphysical desire. Then they rashly seize upon any sort of ideas and activities, anything that is fashionable at the moment and seems to them important for the welfare of individuals–whether it be anti-alcoholism, agricultural reform, eugenics, or the occult sciences. The former first-rate specialist changes into a kind of prophet, into an enthusiast, perhaps even into a fanatic and monomaniac. Thus arises the type of man who wants to reform the world.

Here one sees how a one-sided training of the intellect in technical work may lead to a violent reaction of the neglected irrational impulses of the spirit, but not to a real harmony of critical self-discipline and inner creativeness–rather to a new one-sidedness that clutches about wildly and intemperately…A technical calling, however, does not necessarily precede the world reformer’s intemperance. Men with hot heads, ambition, and an autodidactic urge for advancement, when forced into the technically normalized working conditions of the present day, may easily lose their inner equilibrium in the conflict of the spirit with the world about them and flare up in a blaze. The petty painter and quarellist Hitler, who once had to earn his scanty bread in construction work and in the course of it whipped up his hatred of the Jews into a general philosophy of world-shaking consequences, is a case of this kind (36-37).”

In the transition from Homo Sapiens to Homo Faber, Meinecke explained, we had lost the integrative powers of religion: “This was no specific spiritual force, but a spiritual need springing from and existing for the totality of the soul, and called upon to preserve the inner community of the life of men and to knit the ties between the simple workingman and the cultured man of developed individuality (38).”

    Martin Dies and James Conant, along with other American progressives, had been similarly alarmed by the rupture in human history, a rupture that had prompted the desire for a complexly developed individuality in previously “simple” workingmen; hotheads and ambitious autodidacts were to be cooled out through incorporation into an organic community; special attention would be paid to suppressed metaphysical desires, unpredictably erupting in misguided attempts to reform the world. With class, the materialist analytic category par excellence, translated into the soulful völkisch discourse, the irrationalism of pseudo-Enlightenment watered the growing field of social psychology, a developing discipline ever alert to the monomaniacal propensities of the one-sidedly educated and upwardly mobile protofascist middle class.

    The Official House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities (chaired by the Texas populist Martin Dies) continued the spiritualizing progressive line in 1939, exalting the toleration of specified differences over equality:  “It is as un-American to hate one’s neighbor because he has more of this world’s material goods as it is to hate him because he was born into another race or worships God according to a different faith…The simplest and at the same time the most correct definition of communism, fascism, and nazi-ism is that they all represent forms of dictatorship which deny the divine origin of the fundamental rights of man…[T]hey assume and exercise the power to abridge or take away any or all of these rights as they see fit. In Germany, Italy, and Russia, the state is everything; the individual nothing. The people are puppets in the hands of the ruling dictators…[Rights] are subject to the whims and caprice of the ruling dictators…While the foundation of Americanism is class, racial, and religious tolerance, and the foundation of nazi-ism and fascism is racial and religious hatred, and the foundation of communism is class hatred. Americanism is a philosophy of government based upon the belief in God as the Supreme Ruler of the Universe; nazi-ism, fascism, and communism are pagan philosophies of government which either deny, as in the case of the communist, or ignore as in the case of the fascist and nazi, the existence and divine authority of God. Since nazi-ism, fascism, and communism are materialistic and pagan, hatred is encouraged. Since Americanism is religious, tolerance is the very essence of its being.[ii]“

    Dies was claiming that only Our Founder, Paine’s and Jefferson’s deist God of science, materialism, natural rights, and robust intellectual and religious controversy, should oversee the adaptation of Americanism to the novel conditions of industrial society. Yet it was materialist analysis that was inciting class hatred. What was to be done? Dies’ remarks require further decoding. “The Supreme Ruler of the Universe” wanted the poor to tolerate those with “more of this world’s material goods,” but, as a Jeffersonian, probably not the socially irresponsible nouveaux riches hardening class lines. In his article of 1940, “Education for a Classless Society,” James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard University, looked back with apprehension upon the old Jeffersonian constituency of small farmers and artisans:

“We see throughout the country the development of a hereditary aristocracy of wealth. The coming of modern industrialism and the passing of the frontier with cheap lands mark the change. Ruthless and greedy exploitation of both natural and human resources by a small privileged class founded on recently acquired ownership of property has hardened the social strata and threatens to provide explosive material underneath (46).”

    The Jeffersonian ideal of a universal quality education would require a poetic metamorphosis: the Icarian hubris of the young republic with its “belligerent belief in individual freedom” must be corrected. Conant had reinterpreted the Jeffersonian heritage for the liberal readership of Atlantic Monthly with a palette of earth colors: “As a recent biographer has said, Jefferson believed that any boy or girl was capable of benefiting from the rudiments of education and would be made a better citizen by acquiring them. He believed in keeping open the door of further opportunity to the extent that a poor boy of ability should not be debarred from continuing his education. “To have gone farther and made a higher education compulsory on all,” suggests this biographer,” would have seemed as absurd to him as to have decreed that every crop on his farm, whether tobacco, potatoes, rye, corn, or what not, must be treated and cultivated precisely as every other…. In terms of the citizen, he believed in the maximum equality of opportunity. In terms of the state, he believed in the minimum of compulsion and interference compatible with the training of all its citizens to the maximum capacity of each (45).” [iii]

     Notwithstanding New Deal reformism, the minimalist Jeffersonian State was still here and would not absurdly impose higher education upon the poor boy with different and unequal mental capacities.

    The grand mixed-message of progressive ideology stands revealed again: on the one hand, class mobility should remain fluid; the lower orders must not be repressed and made desperate by exploitative, inflexible capitalists. On the other hand, Conant was aware that higher education in the twentieth century entailed instruction in science and technology, and materialist tools tended to vitiate the authority of conservative religion that progressives believed had hitherto kept the lid on upsurges from below, i.e., “extreme” demands for structural adjustments in institutions self-evidently pitting class against class. As Conant reasoned (turning Jefferson on his head), the State would hamper the development of the less able future citizen by asking that he acquire more than “the rudiments of education”; for Conant the contrast between the “poor boy of ability” and the less generously endowed of his class would be as rooted in biology as the truly self-evident difference between crops of “tobacco, potatoes, rye, corn or what not.” The stage was set for the postwar triumph of ethnopluralism and this ideology’s valorization of group identity and precapitalist traditional culture over common sense and the search for truth. Lest liberal nationalists worry about fragmentation, hostile “ethnic” competition, and the demise of popular sovereignty, the progressive could argue: as a rooted cosmopolitan each hyphenated American would be tolerant of the Others’ (biologically determined) differences.[iv] Dewily refreshed and spiritualized by sleeping minds, races and ethnicities would peacefully co-exist in a setting of inequality and continued upper-class management: the poor would tolerate the rich, while the progressive educator would honor the individuality of groups, having overcome belligerently individualistic mechanical materialists–troublesome gobbet-girls and other leftovers from the eighteenth century teaching the masses how to read the institutions that controlled their lives. American society would remain classless because race or ethnicity or IQ, not class power in the service of individuality, mastery, and the pursuit of happiness, would fertilize the poor boy’s sense of self and his possibilities for creative development.

NOTES.

              [i] 83. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, trans. Sidney Fay ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 36-38. Though he is writing after World War II, Meinecke’s analysis is typical of other organic conservatives. Similar identifications of the class base of fascism were made by Harold Lasswell before the war, and CIA-affiliated social scientists during the 1940s and 50s. George Mosse built an entire academic career on the claim. Cf. the mid-nineteenth century views of Radical Republican Charles Sumner, who vigorously advocated an excellent popular education for all Americans.

                [ii]  84. Martin Dies, “Un-American Activities and Propaganda,” House Reports, misc. 1939, 10-11. By 1939, Stalinists had given Dies lots of ammunition to support the accusation of fomenting class hatred. However, even if Rosa Luxemburg had been at the helm, Dies would not have placed a dispassionate materialist analysis in the American tradition. Cf. Glenn Beck’s and Jonah Goldberg’s criticism of progressivism with the argument of Martin Dies.

                [iii]  85. James Bryant Conant, “Education for a Classless Society: The Jeffersonian Tradition,” in Gail Kennedy editor, Education for Democracy: The Debate Over the Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1952), 46, 45. Originally published in Atlantic Monthly, May 1940 and included in one of the Heath series Problems in American Civilization, Allan Nevins, General Editor. Cf. The Presidential Address of Dr. George S. Counts, American Federation of Teachers convention, August 19-22, 1940. Rejecting messianic ideas that would end exploitation, democratic education was “designed to discipline the young, through knowledge and understanding, in the ways of democracy, in the temperate and responsible use of political processes, in the subordination of individual to social welfare, in the sacrifice of the present to the long-time interests of individual and society. It is an education designed to prepare the young to live by, to labor for, and, if need be, to die for the democratic faith.” Jefferson and Lincoln were cited as exemplars.

       In 1945, Ann Westerfield, a student in the Harvard Graduate School of Education working under the direction of Howard E. Wilson, explained the need to revise the social studies curriculum: “I am desirous of finding out how the courses which include the study of the Negro contribute to the improvement of intergroup relations. A program of instruction which includes the study of intergroups relations should fulfill these criteria. 1. It should aim to develop mutual understanding among the children and youth of the various culture groups as a basis for their cooperation. 2. It should foster an appreciation of the part each has played and can continue to play in making America. 3. It should seek to awaken a sense of comman [sic] adventure among Americans of many antecedents to promote American unity through loyalty to American ideals…Prejudice, I feel, is distinctly a problem for education. In most cases it depends on historical misconceptions or social misunderstandings. People should be brought to analyze their prejudice under the light of historical fact and investigate scientifically the background of these irrationalities. In the future, the foundation of the social community must be cooperation. It is evident to men in this country and all over the world that any attempt at prolonged peace will depend on the renunciation of racial and social prejudice by all the people in the world. Since our country has led the way toward the realization of democratic ideals it is imperative that our conduct be a good example for all…” In Ralph Bunche Papers, UCLA Special Collections, Box 1, Folder 23. Bunche was appalled by such formulations, for he viewed “prejudice” as built into the economic system that pitted black and white workers against each other; bigotry could not be erased without structural transformation.

[iv] 86. By biological determinism, I do not mean that the followers of Herder had a materialist understanding of the natural sciences. As John Crowe Ransom or Eric Voegelin understood the völkisch idea of a national culture, there would be a spiritual uniformity in a people who had interacted for a lengthy period with their specific material environment, evolving into a balanced relationship with nature and each other.

November 18, 2009

The radicalism of the Founders and Herman Melville

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New York Times, 8/26/86, I.23

Bookes into Dragon’s Teeth

How was it possible for Henry A. Murray or Charles Olson or Jay Leyda (all father-figures to many New Left intellectuals) to have read Melville as Hitler, as Jew, as White-Jacket, or Ahab, or Margoth?  How could this organic conservative be anathematized by other organic conservatives?  Melville was accused of exaggerating the suffering of sailors and other workers, hence lending the prestige of an upper-class witness to their grievances; and moreover he refused to turn ruthlessness into Christian charity: though Might was forced by circumstances to be harsh, that didn’t make it Right; authority was demented if it thought otherwise.  Anyway, the more alert members of the lower orders  saw through their double-talking; obscurantist “doctors” and philanthropy were too weak as remedies to correct the inhuman character and the violence of early industrialism and the newspaper-reading “mobocracy.”  It was Melville’s insistence that Christian morality be lived out in everyday life along with his refusal to idealize either leaders or the led, that made him a Jew to “pragmatists” patrolling the perimeters of dissent, spotting possible defectors to another class, escapees who had the self-assurance to lead meaningful reforms.  His darts at confidence-men pierced the very heart of the corporatist liberal project and its attempts to turn the stony prisons of class into sunny meadows (See Bartleby: “I know where I am.”)

Melville’s reservations about democracy as it existed during his lifetime (1819-1891) did not deviate from those of Thomas Paine or of Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams in their correspondence during the early national period:  There could be no informed political choice without universal training in critical thought; the press would be a negative influence insofar as it spread rumors and libels with no equally accessible corrective institutions to challenge them; Catholic immigrants, they feared, inured to obedience to the reactionary church, would undermine rational political processes; similarly Americans should not impose their system of democratic republican government upon foreign peoples (e.g. Spanish-speaking America) still in thrall to autocratic rule; the love of money would doubtless undermine the civil liberties they had fought so hard to establish; it would take hundreds of years for democracy to take hold and there would be periods of regression, but literacy and the presence of mass-produced books would prevent a thoroughgoing return to the Middle Ages.  Such were the fulminations of Hume’s “fanatics”: Lockean radical puritans and deists assessing the obstacles to a fully realized popular sovereignty; with Melville, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic.[1]

[1] See The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon (Chapel Hill: U. North Carolina  Press, 1959). As I have argued above, Jeffersonian agrarian principles could also undermine democratic reforms insofar as they were coopted by Southern apologists for slavery and white supremacy. But in this instance I am referring solely to the question of free thought and popular education.

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