A Student's Guide to U.S. History

Wilfred M. McClay

• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781497645189
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A lively, concise guide to the events and ideas that have shaped America over the centuries. No nation in modern history has had a more powerful sense of its own distinctiveness than the United States. Yet few Americans understand the immensely varied sources of that sense and the fascinating debates that have always swirled around our attempts to define "America" with greater precision. All too many have come to regard the study of their national history as tedious, just as they fail to embrace the past as something in which they must be consciously grounded. In this introduction to the study of American history, Wilfred M. McClay invites us to experience the perennial freshness and vitality of this great subject as he explores some of the enduring commitments and persistent tensions that have made America what it is.

A GALLERY OF WINDOWS

NOW COMES THE PLACE in our exposition where we take a slightly more focused and systematic look at some of the characteristic themes of American history. These are, so to speak, the prime numbers of the field, for they cannot easily be factored down into something more basic—although, to be sure, you will see how readily they link, meld, or overlap. They are also the subjects that one finds weaving in and out of virtually every account, every monograph, and every dissertation and term paper written about the American past. They are the perennial problems of American history. For that reason, as you will see, they often are best expressed not as propositional statements but as questions. For that reason, I have chosen to call them “windows” onto the American past, rather than “sketches” or “ portraits” of elements in that past, for they function more as frameworks, orienting our line of vision and directing our inquiry, than they do as endpoints or findings for the inquiry itself.

The observer who looks at American history through these windows will not see everything. They are, after all, only windows. I am painfully aware of how much is missing, and had I included every window I would have liked, it would have turned a short book into a tome. Still, I trust that the present text does not miss much of the essential drama. In addition to a brief account of each topic, I will offer several suggestions for further reading. Let me stress that the reading suggestions are made idiosyncratically, without trying to be comprehensive or to showcase what is most recent, and that these suggestions are made over and above the canon readings with which the book concludes.

AMERICA AND EUROPE

We have already gotten a glimpse through this window, in recalling the intensity behind European anticipations of a New World as a place of transformation and renewal. But the tensions created by those anticipations persisted, and became an integral part of American identity: the tension of youth versus age, newness versus heritage, innocence versus experience, naturalness versus artificiality, purity versus corruption, guilelessness versus sophistication, rawness versus cultivation. America has never been sure how it is related to Europe, or whether or not it wants to be. From 1776 on, America has been forever declaring independence from Europe. One sees it in Emerson’s famous exhortation, at the end of his “American Scholar” address of 1837—the speech that Oliver Wendell Holmes called a “cultural declaration of independence”—that “we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” and it is time to find our own democratic voice.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, American intellectuals renewed the assault, complaining that the blossoming of an indigenous American culture was being stifled by the imposition of an artificial European “genteel tradition,” and that it was time for America to “come of age.” But those same intellectuals swooned over the European modernism of the celebrated Armory Show of 1913, and then hopped across the ocean to live the expatriate life, and complain, with Ernest Hemingway, about the “broad lawns and narrow minds” of their native land. The rise of fascism and Nazism, and Vichy collaborationism, momentarily took a bit of the luster off of European cultural superiority. But then in the years after World War II, even as their nation was leading the Western democracies, America’s intellectuals were again swooning away, this time to the prophetic utterances of European existentialist sages, and more recently, the recondite texts peddled by the high priests of French poststructuralism.

Such repeated declarations and swoonings lead one to suspect that the desired independence has never quite occurred. Indeed, it is hard to escape the impression that a nagging American sense of cultural inferiority can be traced in an unbroken line from William Byrd II to George Steiner. Since the Second World War, however, with the ascendancy of the United States to the unquestioned political and military leadership of the West, there has been a partial reversal. This has meant that the relationship has taken on new complexity, in which hostile European intellectuals increasingly identify American culture with all that they find most pernicious in the contemporary world—globalism, mass culture, consumerism, free markets, cultural imperialism, McDonald’s hamburgers, and (paradoxically) a persistent weakness for “fundamentalist” religion. Where all this will lead is anyone’s guess. But suffice it to say that the mutual obsession of America and Europe is alive and well.

For additional reading, one has to begin with the great novels and novellas of Henry James, whose depiction of the America/Europe dialectic is unsurpassed, especially in The Wings of the Dove (N.Y., 1902; London, 1998), The Ambassadors (N.Y., 1903; London, 1999), or The Golden Bowl (N.Y., 1904; reprinted 1999). For the more recent version of that dialectic, see James W. Ceaser, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven, Conn., 1997). Also useful are C. Vann Woodward, The Old World’s New World (N.Y., 1991), and Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II (N.Y., 1997).

CAPITALISM

It would be a gross oversight for any primer of American history to neglect the history of American business and economic development. One does not have to be a materialist, Marxian or otherwise, to acknowledge that the nation’s remarkable engine of commerce and productivity both exemplified and underwrites much of what is estimable—and some of what is not so estimable—in our past and present. Unfortunately, the standard survey course in American history is likely either to pass over the subject in silence, as one too complex for meat-headed undergraduates, or to treat it as a one-sided morality tale of unending horror, driven by an economic system whose stark inhumanity is so plain that its costs and benefits need not even be measured against any real-world competitors. Many an undergraduate emerging from his professors’ lectures on American capitalism can say what Calvin Coolidge said upon being asked about a clergyman’s disquisition on sin: “He said he was against it.”

Part of the problem is with the word “capitalism.” We cannot avoid using it, if for no other reason than that so much of the world associates it so heavily with the United States. But few words are used with more maddening imprecision. By virtue of its being paired so often with “socialism” or “communism,” one could easily be led to think that “capitalism” denotes a coherent, systematic theory of economic organization, developed first as a comprehensive abstract philosophy before being tested as a practice. But what we call “capitalism” is actually something very different; it is, for the most part, a set of practices and institutions that were already well established before they became incorporated into an “ism.” When we compare capitalism with socialism, we too often are comparing apples and oranges.

In addition, one never knows what the dispraise of “capitalism” is really dispraising. Does it refer to the huge fortunes of industrial tycoons? Or merely to a strong defense of the sanctity of private property? Or a system of structural inequality in the distribution of wealth? Or the ideology of the unregulated free market? Or a cultural habit of acquisitiveness and consumerism? Or a cultural system in which all things are regarded as “commodities,” objects for sale? Or a “preferential option” favoring the most unrestricted possible approach to the full range of economic development?

All of these, and more, may be meant at any given time. But one perhaps comes closest to the core of the matter if one sees capitalism as a social system which is so organized as to recognize, protect, and draw upon a unique form of accumulated wealth called “capital.” In that sense, the capitalist system is characterized not only by markets, joint-stock companies, private banks, and other instruments of business enterprise and commerce, but by a whole range of institutions made possible by the living and self-perpetuating qualities of accumulated wealth. Among such institutions are the large philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher education which live almost entirely off of their “endowments,” which is to say, the “unearned” wealth generated by the unique properties of the capital they possess—capital that generally is accumulated by the Gettys, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies of the nation’s history. One could, with considerable justification, say that there is no more “capitalist” institution than the modern American Ivy League university.

The student who misses out on the history of business (and its natural companion, the history of labor) also misses out on the most far-reaching questions of social organization to be found in the American past. How and why did the republican values of the Founding generation give way to the entrepreneurial liberal capitalism of the nineteenth century, and then to the corporate capitalism of the twentieth? How did the implementation of an industrial system of production, in tandem with the establishment of national networks of distribution, change the character of American society, the structure of organizational life, and the texture of work itself? What are the pluses and minuses entailed in each of these changes? And, looking ahead to the future, is the dynamic of “creative destruction” that many analysts see as the driving force of modern capitalism compatible with a settled and civilized social order? If not, then what can the past tell us about how that force might be effectively tamed or channeled? Or is “creative destruction” a simplistic and unhelpful way to think about the force behind a system as dependent upon a vast array of political, social, legal, cultural, and moral props as capitalism is?

Each of these questions involves fundamental questions of social philosophy, every bit as much as they involve questions of economic organization—for values are implicit in even the most mundane economic decision. After all, even when one is merely “maximizing utility,” as the economists like to put it, the meaning of “utility” is far from self-evident. The man who works like a dog to make the money to acquire the Lexus to impress his neighbors is doing something much more complicated than “maximizing utility,” something that many of us—including, perhaps, the man himself in a fleetingly lucid moment—would not regard as useful at all.

For additional reading: The dean of historians of American business is Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and his masterwork, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977; reprinted 1980), is must reading, despite its difficulty and its strange de-emphasis on political history. See also Friedrich von Hayek, Capitalism and the Historians (Chicago, 1954; reprinted, 1963); Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980; reprinted 1996); Robert Higgs’s splendid Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (N.Y., 1987; reprinted 1989); Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (N.Y., 1984); and, as a corrective to the overdrawn portrait of “Robber Barons” in the “Gilded Age”—two long-in-the-tooth epithets that are overdue for retirement—see Burton Folsom, Jr., The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America (Herndon, Va., 1991, third edition, 1993), and Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore, 1986; reprinted, 1997). Students who want to see the classic overdrawn portrait in all its gargoyle glory should consult Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (N.Y., 1934; reprinted, 1962).

THE CITY

America, asserted historian Richard Hofstadter, was born in the country and has moved to the city. Whether that is true or not, it certainly is true that many Americans have regarded urban life with ambivalence, at best, and as something other than the natural condition of humankind. Thomas Jefferson’s fervent belief in the virtuousness of the agricultural life has echoed throughout American history; so too, has the perfervid vision of all great cities as Babylonian fleshpots, brothels, and sinkholes of iniquity, rather than jewels of civilization and refinement. The flight from the city into the suburbs is not a post-World War II innovation; it was already well underway at the end of the nineteenth century, for those few who could afford it. Our contemporary concerns about suburban sprawl and clogged highways need to be seen against this historical background of a strong and persistent American aversion to the urban idea, and a willingness to pay almost any price for even the most fleeting and self-defeating whiff of country life.

But that aversion has to be weighed against an intense fascination with the modern city—its glamour, its industry, its human contrasts, its amazing technological feats, its rich cultural life, its peculiar solitudes, and above all its phenomenal concentration of human energy and dynamism, all memorably captured in the lush pageantry of Walt Whitman’s urban poetry. Hofstadter’s quip may have accurately described one of the longtime limitations of American historical writing, which took an astoundingly long time to recognize the city as a worthy topic of investigation. But it can hardly be said to describe the attitudes of all Americans. Even more powerful than Jefferson’s belief in the moral purity of yeoman farmers has been the belief in the great city as the place of escape, and the avenue of advancement and self-realization, for those fleeing from the confinements and stunted possibilities of rural and small-town life. Even more admirable than Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia’s “academical village” was the inspired public vision of Frederick Law Olmsted, who made New York City’s Central Park into one of the great urban parks of the world. And infinitely more impressive than the elegant eclecticism of Jefferson’s Monticello was the astounding tapering design of Manhattan’s Empire State Building, a colossus raised up defiantly, against all odds, during the worst depths of the Great Depression, as a beacon of hope and a monument to American ambition. If there is an abiding American yearning to flee the rootless city for the rooted land, there also is an equal and opposite yearning, whose finest aspect is captured in the stirring, breath-catching sight of that one solitary building, rising with magnificent improbability above the lowlands of Thirty-fourth Street.

For additional reading, see Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge, Mass., 1962; Westport, Conn., 1981), Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (N.Y., 1961; London, 2000), Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington, Ky., 1975; Baltimore, 1982), and Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (N.Y., 1985; reprinted 1987).

EQUALITY

This is one of the keywords of American history, an incantatory concept that commands almost universal assent in contemporary American life. Such inequality as exists in contemporary American society—and of course, there is an enormous amount of it—is tolerated in fact, but it is generally not regarded as justifiable in principle. Belief in equality is a closely held article of faith, against which one dissents at one’s peril. The absolute quality of this article of faith of course makes it difficult to explain the hierarchies and asymmetries that in fact exist, and always have existed, and will continue to exist, in American life. Indeed, one of the forces propelling the egalitarian policies of modern American liberalism is the troubled conscience of the privileged, who cannot justify (...