Is America Breaking Apart?

John A. Hall, Charles Lindholm

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691090115
  9780691004105
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400822843
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Is the United States a nation of materialistic loners whose politics are dictated by ethnic, racial, religious, or sexual identities? This is what America has become in the eyes of many commentators. Americans seem to fear that their society is breaking apart, but how accurate is this portrayal and how justified is the fear? Introducing a balanced viewpoint into this intense debate, John Hall and Charles Lindholm demonstrate that such alarm is unfounded. Here they explore the institutional structures of American society, emphasizing its ability to accommodate difference and reduce conflict. The culture, too, comes under scrutiny: influenced by Calvinistic beliefs, Americans place faith in the individual but demand high moral commitment to the community. Broad in scope and ambition, this short book draws a realistic portrait of a society that is among the most powerful and stable in the world, yet is perennially shaken by self-doubt.

Concern over the cohesiveness of American society, Hall and Lindholm argue, is actually a product of a shared cultural belief in human distinctiveness and equality. They find that this shared belief paradoxically leads Americans to exaggerated worries about disunity, since they are afraid that disagreements among co-equals will rend apart a fragile community based solely on consensus and caring. While there is little dissent among Americans over essential values, racism still abounds. Here the authors predict that the homogenizing force of economic participation might still be the key to mending the wounds of racial turmoil.

By combining history, sociology, and anthropology, the authors cover a wide range of past and recent challenges to the stability of American society: from the history of unions to affirmative action, from McCarthyism to militant distrust of government, from early prejudice toward Irish and Italian immigrants to current treatment of African Americans. Hall and Lindholm do not skirt the internal contradictions and moral tensions of American society but nonetheless recognize the strength and promise of its institutions and culture. Their book is a vivid, sweeping response to the doomsayers in the reassessment of our society.

The growth of political stability

PART ONE

REGRETTABLY, scholars who investigate social and political processes do not possess a neat set of neutral and uncontested terms. What is beneficial for some people may be catastrophic for others, with the balance between the two almost always hard to calibrate. Behind our relatively simple and straightforward account of the growth of political stability in the United States lurk many moral ambiguities. We intend to accentuate, rather than to hide from, such troubling areas of ambivalence and opposition.

However, this does not mean that we propose to mount a soapbox. Stability is taken in a strictly social scientific sense, that is, as the relatively unquestioned hegemony of a set of social arrangements—by which is meant the destruction or absence of genuine societal alternatives and the diminution of collective efforts, violent or otherwise, to achieve them. Stability may be—indeed, should be—judged from differing perspectives: the “peace” of the cold war felt very different in Prague than in London, just as the contemporary consensus in Washington between Speaker Gingrich and President Clinton looks altogether different to denizens of inner-city ghettos than it does to corporate executives. Our intent is to lay bare mechanisms of stability that will be recognized as such both by those who endorse and by those who contest the status quo.

Our argument analyzes the pattern of America’s past. Our purpose is not to provide a skeletal narrative history, but rather to trace the gradual forging of a powerful national political structure. Four historical turning points are seen as crucial. Accounting for the creation of a popular national entity must be the initial task. How did a set of of disparate colonies manage to achieve union? Second, it is equally important to remember that unity then had to be maintained. America did nearly break apart as the result of slavery; only massive violence preserved the Union and emancipated the slaves, although racism continued to plague American society. The third historical moment is the challenge posed by white workers who rebelled against the confines of the industrial wage contract. The societal alternative that they proposed came to naught, with violence again playing a major role in its destruction. Finally, we argue that involvement with the wider world—especially military involvement—has done most to affect American political stability in the twentieth century. Two points stand out here. In the first place, military participation together with the desire to lead by example helped to occasion domestic reform, especially in the area of civil rights. In the second place, the hegemonic power of the United States within the world political economy means that its internal social arrangements are not likely to change as the result of external pressures.

1

The state and the people

The establishment of a stable federal government in America was not a foregone conclusion. In fact, a mood of considerable pessimism reigned among the revolutionary leaders in the years immediately following independence. Virtue seemed to have deserted the new republic, putting its continued existence into doubt. One problem was that of containing popular revolutionary enthusiasm. Rebellions like that of Daniel Shay suggested that the country was becoming ungovernable, with the privileged class position of the elite accordingly being put at risk. Much radical agitation took place at the state level, thereby highlighting a second problem. For the newly independent colonies, national unity was a matter of acute concern. The confluence of different local cultures and interests within America meant that loyalty to states, regions, and localities was so strong that the possibility of an end to the confederation was very real. We therefore begin by examining the colonial condition and the nature of the struggle against the British. This will allow an appreciation of the manner in which the constitutional settlement contained radical sentiments. We then turn our attention to the way in which the national question was resolved.

The undoubted cultural, economic, and political differences within British North America—between the Puritans of Massachusetts, the distressed cavaliers of Virginia, the Quakers of the Delaware, and the Scots-Irish of Pennsylvania and the West¹—were counterbalanced by a series of uniformities. The first and most obvious were linguistic and cultural. Whatever their differences, the colonists were nonetheless English in both language and custom. The importance of a shared religion can also scarcely be exaggerated. The colonists were overwhelmingly Protestant, and many had fled from religious persecution. Of course, this did not in itself necessarily lead to toleration: some groups—especially the Puritans of the Northeast—zealously sought to impose their own uniformities. But a series of forces mitigated against the emergence of permanent religious schisms. For one thing, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Virginians were relatively tolerant of other Protestant sects. For another, where intolerance was greatest, the openness of the society allowed dissidents to depart to build their own versions of Jerusalem, hence avoiding war with one another. Furthermore, in a decentralized agrarian society where self-sufficiency was compulsory, there was an inevitable movement away from orthodoxy to independent judgment in matters of faith. The Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century saw what was to become a recurring pattern within American life, namely, the stimulation of popular religious enthusiasm at the expense of the hierarchies of established churches.²

The political economy of the colonists exhibited further common features. This agrarian capitalist world, linked to the British metropole by exports, enjoyed extraordinary success, which was later augmented by increasing commercial enterprise in the ports and cities. Both Adam Smith and Tocqueville commented on the relatively high standard of living and remarkable fertility of British North America.³ It is not correct to suggest, however, as do some of the theorists of American exceptionalism, that there was in consequence an egalitarian distribution of wealth and income.⁴ To the contrary, colonial life witnessed the emergence of a potential upperclass. Large plantations dominated the South, while descendants of the early settlers in the North made huge commercial fortunes. In 1670, an estimated one-third of all wealth was held by 5 percent of the population. A century later, 3 percent owned one-quarter of the wealth, and around the time Tocqueville was extolling equality as the central aspect of the American experience, wealth was distributed more disproportionately than at any time before or since: 1 percent of the population owned more than a third of all wealth, while the top 10 percent held not less than four-fifths. Nor was there any great social mobility: in this era, less than 2 percent of the rich were not born rich.⁵

This is, of course, but one side of the matter. “One of the most striking features of class in America is the widespread disbelief in its existence.”⁶ We will discuss this remarkable ideology at more length later, but note here that the inability of the early American gentry to gain genuine deference was due in part to the fact that in America—so different from Europe at this point—elite status derived primarily from mercantile success. Even in the South, aristocratic Virginian planters traced their ancestry to tradespeople who had purchased their nobility. A known history of achieved status undercut any elite claims to innate superiority and lessened the potential for class warfare. Furthermore, as Turner noted, the availability of new lands to the west “did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.”⁷ American settler-farmers thus bore some resemblance to nomads in being able to get up and move, and were therefore resistant to control by any establishment.⁸ All this deserves summary: for Americans, success existed both in fact and as aspiration.

A shared racism also underwrote early American unity. There may very well be, as Orlando Patterson has argued for many years, a deep connection between the concepts of freedom and slavery.⁹ Just as the idea of freedom arose in the slave societies of Greece, so, too, was liberty appreciated in early America in counterpoise to its opposite: “among whites of all orders slavery established a kind of equality.”¹⁰ Recent scholarship has come to consider the dispossession of Native Americans as equally racist. Because property was recognized only in the form of agricultural land, settlers were legally permitted and even encouraged to use force and fraud to dislocate the aboriginal inhabitants. Appropriation of native land was also excused, by John Locke, on the grounds of efficiency:

For I aske whether in the wild woods and uncultivated wast of America left to Nature, without any improvement, tillage or husbandry, a thousand acres will yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many conveniences of life as ten acres of equally fertile land doe in Devonshire where they are well cultivated?¹¹

Believing dispossession to be the replacement of savagery by civilization, and viewing slavery as a confirmation of the natural superiority of whites over blacks, the vast majority of white Americans were solidly united in maintaining their innate right to dominate and disinherit other races.

These unifying aspects were amplified by British intervention. It is true that the logistics of early modern communications meant that control of the colonies from Westminster was necessarily sketchy and occasional. Still, the crown did attempt to rein in the effective independence of this diverse and decentralized new society—about which, however, it knew next to nothing. Considerable popular resentment was aroused by the British attempt to undermine Puritan hegemony in Massachusetts and by the Proclamation of 1763, which threatened to limit expansion to the West; more important, the interests of local gentry everywhere in the colonies were threatened by the possibility of blocked social mobility should London start to send out large numbers of its own governing agents. What came to matter most, however, was taxation. British military success in the late eighteenth century was bought at considerable financial cost, and the central state sought to share the burden of defense by asking for what were in fact rather limited contributions from the colonies.¹² This was timed inopportunely. Fiscal extraction tends to be accepted when the necessity for protection by a state is obvious. The very amplitude of the British victories in the French and Indian Wars undermined the rationale for taxation. Meanwhile, the sugar interests of the Caribbean used their great influence in the English parliament to enact duties aimed at retaining their own domination of trade: the perceived unfairness and exploitative nature of these taxes outraged the colonists.

The colonial opponents of British demands did not initially see themselves as anything other than British. They were firmly committed to the British political tradition’s stress on individual liberties and rights. The refusal of Britain to pay attention to the old maxims of canon law and parliamentary tradition (“no taxation without representati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: The growth of political stability
• Part Two: Sociability in America
• Conclusion
• Index