The First New Nation

The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective

Donald K. Routh, Donald K. Routh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351482790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The United States was the first major colony to revolt successfully against colonial rule. In this sense, it was the first "new nation." To see how, in the course of American history, its values took shape in institutions may help us to understand some of the problems faced by the new nations emerging today on the world scene. In The First New Nation, two broad themes occupy Seymour Martin Lipset's attention: the social conditions that make a stable democracy possible, and the extent to which the American experience was representative or exceptional.

The volume is divided into three parts, each of which deals with the role of values in a nation's evolution, but each approaches this role from a different perspective. Part 1, "America as a New Nation, " compares early America with today's emerging nations to discover problems common to them as new nations, and analyzes some of the consequences of a revolutionary birth for the creation of a national character and style. Part 2, "Stability in the Midst of Change, " traces how values derived from America's revolutionary origins have continued to influence the form and substance of American institutions.

Lipset concentrates on American history in later periods, selecting for discussion as critical cases religious institutions and trade unions. Part 3, "Democracy in Comparative Perspective, " attempts to show by comparative analysis some ways through which a nation's values determine its political evolution. It compares political development in several modern industrialized democracies, including the United States, touching upon value patterns, value differences, party systems, and the bases of social cleavage.

PART 1 AMERICA AS A NEW NATION

1 Establishing National Authority

The United States may properly claim the title of the first new nation. It was the first major colony successfully to break away from colonial rule through revolution. It was, of course, followed within a few decades by most of the Spanish colonies in Central and South America. But while the United States exemplifies a new nation which successfully developed an industrial economy, a relatively integrated social structure (the race issue apart) and a stable democratic polity, most of the nations of Latin America do not. They remain underdeveloped economically, divided internally along racial, class, and (in some cases) linguistic lines, and have unstable polities, whether democratic or dictatorial. So perhaps the first new nation can contribute more than money to the latter-day ones; perhaps its development can give us some clues as to how revolutionary equalitarian and populist values may eventually become incorporated into a stable nonauthoritarian polity.

In this section I will examine the early period of America’s history as a new nation, in an effort to elucidate through comparative analysis some of the problems and some of the developmental processes that are common to all new nations. And in so doing, I will also highlight some of the circumstances that were unique to American development, some of the conditions that made young America a particularly auspicious place to develop democratic institutions.

There is a tendency for older nations to view with impatience the internal turmoil of new ones, and to become especially alarmed at the way oligarchical-dictatorial and revolutionary forces shake their tenuous foundations. Coupled with this is a tendency to expect them to accomplish in a decade what other nations have taken a century or more to do. A backward glance into our own past should destroy the notion that the United States proceeded easily toward the establishment of democratic political institutions. In the period which saw the establishment of political legitimacy and party government, it was touch and go whether the complex balance of forces would swing in the direction of a one- or two-party system, or even whether the nation would survive as an entity. It took time to institutionalize values, beliefs, and practices, and there were many incidents that revealed how fragile the commitments to democracy and nationhood really were.

But it was from this crucible of confusion and conflict that values and goals became defined, issues carved out, positions taken, in short an identity established. For countries, like people, are not handed identities at birth, but acquire them through the arduous process of “growing up,” a process which is a notoriously painful affair.

Let us now turn to a more detailed examination of some of the specific problems common to new nations.

The Crisis of Legitimacy and the Role of the Charismatic Leader

A basic problem faced by all new nations and post-revolutionary societies is the crisis of legitimacy. The old order has been abolished and with it the set of beliefs that justified its system of authority. The imperialist ogre upon whom all ills were blamed has now disappeared, and there has been a slackening of the great unifying force, nationalism, under whose banner private, ethnic, sectional, and other differences were submerged. The new system is in the process of being formed and so the questions arise: To whom is loyalty owed? And why?

Legitimacy of any kind is derived from shared beliefs, that is, from a consensus as to what constitutes proper allegiance. Such a consensus develops slowly. In the words of Ernest Renan in a lecture in 1882: “To have done great things together in the past, to wish to do more of them, these are the essential conditions for being a people. . . . The existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite.”¹ In the early period of a nation’s history, the results of this plebiscite are never a foregone conclusion.

According to Max Weber, there are basically three ways in which an authority may gain legitimacy, that is, an accepted “title to rule”:

(1) It may gain legitimacy through tradition, through “always” having possessed it—the title held by monarchical societies is essentially of this type.

(2) Rational-legal authority exists when those in power are obeyed because of a popular acceptance of the appropriateness of the system of rules under which they have won and hold office.

(3) Charismatic authority rests upon faith in a leader who is believed to be endowed with great personal worth: this may come from God, as in the case of a religious prophet, or may simply arise from the display of extraordinary talents.

Old states possess traditional legitimacy, and this need not concern us further, beyond suggesting that new nations may sometimes be in a position to enhance their own legitimacy by incorporating the already existing legitimacy of subordinate centers or persons of authority. Thus, new nations which retain local rulers—for example dukes, counts, chiefs, clan heads, etc.—and create a larger national system of authority based on them, may be more stable than those which seek to destroy such local centers of authority. It can be argued that the case of Europe’s most stable republican government, Switzerland, is to be explained as a consequence of the preservation of cantonal government and power, i.e., as an extension of cantonal legitimacy. Contemporary Malaya is a recent example of an effort to foster national legitimacy by retaining traditional symbols of local rule.²

But where traditional legitimacy is absent, as it was in post-revolutionary America or France and in much of contemporary Asia and Africa, it can be developed only through reliance on legal and/or charismatic authority.

Legal domination, resting on the assumption that the created legal structure is an effective means of attaining group ends, is necessarily a weak source of authority in societies in which the law has been identified with the interests of an imperial exploiter. Charismatic authority, on the other hand, is well suited to the needs of newly developing nations. It requires neither time nor a rational set of rules, and is highly flexible. A charismatic leader plays several roles. He is first of all the symbol of the new nation, its hero who embodies in his person its values and aspirations. But more than merely symbolizing the new nation, he legitimizes the state, the new secular government, by endowing it with his “gift of grace.” David Apter has shown how the government of Ghana gained diffuse legitimacy from the charisma of Nkrumah.³ Charismatic authority can be seen as a mechanism of transition, an interim measure, which gets people to observe the requirements of the nation out of affection for the leader until they eventually learn to do it out of loyalty to the collectivity.⁴

Charismatic leadership, however, because it is so personalized, is extremely unstable. The source of authority is not something distinct from the various actions and agencies of authority, so that particular dissatisfaction can easily become generalized disaffection. The charismatic leader must therefore either make open criticism impermissible or he must transcend partisan conflict by playing the role of a constitutional monarch. Even where opposition to specific policies on an individual—or informal factional—basis may be tolerated, there cannot be an Opposition to him that is organized into a formal party with its own leader. But the difference between these options can have fateful consequences for the entire nation.

The early American Republic, like many of the new nations, was legitimized by charisma. We tend to forget today that, in his time, George Washington was idolized as much as many of the contemporary leaders of new states. As Marcus Cunliffe, the English author of a brilliant biography of the first President, points out:

In the well-worn phrase of Henry Lee, he was first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen. . . . He was the prime native hero, a necessary creation for a new country. . . . Hence . . . the comment . . . made by the European traveler Paul Svinin, as early as 1815: “Every American considers it his sacred duty to have a likeness of Washington in his home, just as we have the images of God’s saints.” For America, he was originator and vindicator, both patron saint and defender of the faith, in a curiously timeless fashion, as if he were Charlemagne, Saint Joan and Napoleon Bonaparte telescoped into one person. . . .⁵

And:

[T]he dying Roman emperor Vespasian is supposed to have murmured: “Alas, I think I am about to become a god.” . . . George Washington . . . might with justice have thought the same thing as he lay on his deathbed at Mount Vernon in 1799. Babies were being christened after him as early as 1775, and while he was still President, his countrymen paid to see him in waxwork effigy. To his admirers he was “godlike Washington,” and his detractors complained to one another that he was looked upon as a “demigod” whom it was treasonable to criticize. “O Washington!” declared Ezra Stiles of Yale (in a sermon of 1783). “How I do love thy name! How have I often adored and blessed thy God, for creating and forming thee the great ornament of human kind!” . . .

His contemporaries vied in their tributes—all intended to express the idea that there was something superhuman about George Washington. . . .

Some of his countrymen—notably John Adams—were a little irked by the Washington cult. They felt that adulation had gone too far—as in the suggestion that God had denied Washington children of his own so that he might assume paternity for the whole nation. But even Adams was prepared to defend Washington as a native product against all challengers from other lands, with the proviso that Washington’s virtues were America’s virtues, rather than vice versa.⁶

Washington’s role as the charismatic leader under whose guidance democratic political institutions could grow was not an unwitting one:

America’s primary requirement, as he saw it, was confidence. Crescit eundo—She grows as she goes—could well have been the Union’s official motto. In the words of his Farewell Address, “time and habit are at least as necessary to fix the true character of government as of other human institutions. . . .

“With me ... a predominant motive has been, to endeavor to gain time for our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency, which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes.”⁷

Like latter-day leaders of new states, Washington was under pressure from those close to him actually to become an autocrat. However, he recognized that his most important contribution to the new state was to give it time to establish what we now call a rational-legal system of authority, a government of men under law. He permitted the members of his cabinet to form hostile factions under the leadership of Hamilton and Jefferson, even though he personally disliked the views of Jeffersonians.⁸ Before leaving office in 1797, he brought together Hamilton and Madison (leader of the Jeffersonians) to prepare drafts for his Farewell Address. And in the final sentence of the address he expressed the hope that his words “may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit.”⁹

Washington wished to retire after one term in office, but the conflict between his two principal collaborators would not permit it. And on the urging of many, including Hamilton and Jefferson, he agreed to serve another term—thereby unwittingly permitting the further peaceful extension of party conflict while he was still President, though, of course, he bitterly regretted the emergence of such parties. This turned out to be a crucial decision, since during his second administration, the country was torn apart by opposing opinions of the French Revolution, and between pro-British and pro-French sentiments.¹⁰

There seems little question that Washington was treated like a charismatic leader. But his refusal to take full advantage of his potential charisma—he withdrew from the presidency while seemingly in good health—doubtless pushed the society faster toward a legal-rational system of authority than would have been the case had he taken over the charismatic role in toto and identified himself with the laws and the spirit of the nation. This particular halfway type of charismatic leadership had a critical stabilizing effect on the society’s evolution. Of particular importance in this regard is the fact that the first succession conflict between John Adams and Jefferson took place while Washington still held office, enabling him to set a precedent as the first head of a modern state to turn over office to a duly elected successor. If he had continued in office until his death, it is quite possible that subsequent presidential successions would not have occurred so easily.

The charismatic aspects of Washington’s appeal were consciously used by political leaders as a means of assuring the identity of the young nation. In 1800, shortly after Washington’s death, the then British Ambassador to the United States analyzed the functions...