The Paradox of Power

Statebuilding in America, 1754-1920

Ballard C. Campbell

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780700632572
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Frühe amerikanische Geschichte

America's political history is a fascinating paradox. The United States was born with the admonition that government posed a threat to liberty. This apprehension became the foundation of the nation's civic ideology and was embedded in its constitutional structure. Yet the history of public life in the United States records the emergence of an enormously powerful national state during the nineteenth century. By 1920, the United States was arguably the most powerful country in the world. In The Paradox of Power Ballard C. Campbell traces this evolution and offers an explanation for how it occurred.Campbell argues that the state in America is rooted in the country's colonial experience and analyzes the evidence for this by reviewing governance at all levels of the American polity—local, state, and national—between 1754 and 1920. Campbell poses five critical causal references: war, geography, economic development, culture and identity (including citizenship and nationalism), and political capacity. This last factor embraces law and constitutionalism, administration, and political parties. The Paradox of Power makes a major contribution to our understanding of American statebuilding by emphasizing the fundamental role of local and state governance to successfully integrate urban, state, and national governments to create a composite and comprehensive portrait of how governance evolved in America.

1

The Dynamics of American Statebuilding

Within the span of two lifetimes, thirteen British colonies in North America evolved into an enormously wealthy and powerful national state. “America,” as the world called this new society, evoked myriad images: a people that passionately embraced liberty and cherished individual rights and equality, an abundance of natural riches, widespread economic opportunity, political democracy, and, eventually, massive military might. Less celebrated but central to America’s history were the genocidal war on Native Americans, repeated use of coercive force against residents and foreign foes, support of slavery, persistent racism, gender inequality, and business monopolies. These blemishes have contributed to an American political history that is both distinctive and paradoxical.

On the eve of the American Revolution, 3 million persons, mainly free British subjects and their slaves, were concentrated on the coastal plain of the Atlantic from Maine to Georgia. In 1920 the United States was home to 106 million people, making its population the fourth largest in the world. By the early twentieth century Americans lived on lands that stretched 3,000 miles across North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. This geography made the United States the fourth largest country on earth, and in terms of fertile soil, the second largest. Even before World War I, which confirmed the United States’ membership in the club of world powers, the size of its economy exceeded that of all others, and its workers’ wages were among the highest anywhere.

By the mid-nineteenth century the United States was already the world’s largest democracy. Its citizens possessed broad legal protections that were the envy of the world, despite racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities. In the early twentieth century the United States had the world’s largest system of free education, probably the highest percentage of homeownership, and more motor vehicles than any other nation. Millions of immigrants abandoned familiar surroundings to share in the opportunities that America offered. In addition to the reproduction of American institutions across the continent, the United States inserted its influence in the Caribbean and across much of the Pacific basin at the dawn of the twentieth century. This development resulted in the fusion of diverse dynamics that turned a group of “little republics” into a powerful national state between the 1760s and 1920. What propelled this political transformation?

THE AMERICAN PARADOX

The evolution of the American state began with European outposts in North America. The largest were colonies of Great Britain, which had built a strong central state and possessed a formidable military. Most residents of Britain’s American colonies were proud to be members of the British Empire. But resentment of Britain’s effort to force colonial loyalty to a “tyrannical” king led to revolution and independence. America was thus born denouncing monarchy and central state authority (Parliament and the king’s ministers), enshrining the axiom that government, especially the central regime, was an ever-present threat to liberty. This conviction became the central theme of the new republic’s ideology and was seared into its civic DNA. Political leaders and cultural tradition perpetuated this antistatist outlook, which was engraved into the country’s constitutions. Given that the United States possessed the most pronounced antistatist ideology in the modern world, how did it become the world’s most powerful state?

This question disputes the contention that there was no “state” in America before the twentieth century. Recent reassessments have challenged this traditional view, but a composite portrait of the process is needed.¹ The history of the long nineteenth century (1763–1920) shows that America always acted like a state. The antecedents of American statebuilding began in the colonial period, when local governments assumed a broad range of authorities. Local officials had the authority to use deadly force to defend the homeland. They sent individuals to the gallows for theft, rape, and unwed pregnancy. Home-grown lawmakers levied taxes to support militias and sometimes drafted men to fill their ranks. Colonial and later state militias defended Europeans from Native Americans and drove the latter from their lands. These actions represent the application of powers that lie at the core of statehood.

After independence, a triumvirate of governments—local, state, and national—shepherded the country into existence as a national state. The federal (i.e., national) government remained small in its early decades, yet its officials were hardly impotent. Despite the well-known constraints on their authority, federal officials played a significant role in American statebuilding. The national government has always asserted its right as a sovereign to enforce its laws in all territories claimed by the United States.

American history thus presents a paradox. The country’s defining ideology preached restraints on civic authority, but the actual uses of governmental power repeatedly contradicted this stricture. There is no simple explanation for this disjuncture. American history, however, suggests that most decisions to use governmental power have been situational in nature. That is, practical actions were taken in response to particular circumstances that were usually seen as problematic. These situations assumed various forms, ranging from crises, such as an attack on the United States, to conflicts that evolved over decades, such as slavery and dislocations traceable to industrialization. Time and again, specific circumstances arose that either triggered a public demand for remedial action or served as a rationale for actions taken by power holders. Time and again, pragmatic responses to problems trumped America’s cautionary ideology.

Attitudes were not uniform across society or among lawmakers. Ideology is not an undifferentiated catechism; variations in belief exist among individuals and groups. These differences and the material conditions associated with them spawned conflicting interests (e.g., North and South, capitalist and worker, Republican and Democrat) that opened pathways for policymaking within the maze of ideological and constitutional constraints.² Nonetheless, politicians are skilled at justifying their actions in terms of their consistency with the nation’s civic heritage.

A second reason for the paradoxical relationship between theory and action in American politics is the existence of many “states” in the United States. Most Americans live in several jurisdictions—namely, in the United States (under the federal government), in a state (or states) of residence, and in a particular city or town. These overlapping structures of government and their respective legal authorities have always been present in America. During most of the long nineteenth century the national government remained weaker than its European counterparts, while matrices of state and local governments performed most civic tasks and took on more responsibilities as time advanced.

Skeptics may reply that the subnational governments were not really components of a state, that they did not constitute a central regime. It is true that the American scheme of governance fragmented civic authority and distributed it broadly. But this fact does not negate the existence of state powers. Individual state and local governments exercised authority over specified territories with clearly marked boundaries. They possessed the power to tax (i.e., to take property from residents) and to use coercive force such as capital punishment, deployment of militias, and enforcement of social regulations. Federal and state courts consistently recognized the constitutional legitimacy of these powers. By any reasonable criteria, civic entities that could tax, use deadly force, and regulate social relations within a specified territorial arena held powers that lay at the heart of a state.

The federal system has obscured much of this history. James Bryce, a perceptive British observer of American government, emphasized this impaired ability to track political activity in the United States. The union, he wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, is “more than an aggregate of States and the States are more than parts of the Union.” The United States, he continued, “is a Commonwealth of commonwealths.” Hence, Americans have “two loyalties, two patriotisms.” Understanding American civic life, Bryce opined, required recognition of this “double organization.”³ That is, one must study both levels of government—the federal and the subnational tiers.

Another reason that the pragmatic tradition in American governance has been underappreciated has to do with the incremental growth of governmental power. Deference to antistatist ideas surfaced repeatedly, as political conditions waxed and waned. Yet, over the course of the long nineteenth century, the scope and scale of state power expanded. During this evolution, government at all three levels took on more tasks, developed greater administrative capacity, and acquired more revenue to fund these activities. Gauging the growth of the American state requires the reconstruction of these trends.

THE NATURE OF A STATE

States have a long history, originating in antiquity, and sometimes took the form of empires. Most scholars agree that “modern” states emerged in western Europe after 1500. These new regimes had three fundamental elements. First, they were territorially bounded, with defined borders and a central government that possessed the authority to rule (the capacity to make law) in the areas for which it claimed jurisdiction. In our own time these territorial realms are plotted conspicuously on maps. Second, states were independent in the sense that they were self-governing; in the language of international law, they had sovereignty. Within their own territory, political leaders were autonomous decisionmakers, owing allegiance only to their state and to its monarch, its constituents, or both. The king’s ministers and the nation’s president negotiated with the leaders of other countries within the system of states, with powerful nations possessing hegemonic influence over lesser countries. Third, states had the authority to take property from inhabitants, usually in the form of taxes, and they possessed a legal monopoly on the use of lethal force, which could be utilized to enforce their rules. Coercive and fiscal functions are customarily assigned to specialized personnel, such as military forces, police, and revenue officers. These two legal entitlements—to use coercive force and to extract wealth from residents—differentiate states from other entities. Territorial jurisdiction, the sovereign authority to govern, and the capacity to take life and property make states extraordinarily powerful entities.⁴

As modern states matured they acquired additional attributes—notably, bureaucracy, whereby administrative units were devised and officers were appointed to superintend particular civic tasks. Administrative personnel assumed defined roles within hierarchical organizations whose purpose was defined by law, and they established relationships with groups outside of government. Over time, administrative organizations became institutionalized; rules and routines for overseeing policy objectives become fixed, and bureaucracies assumed semiautonomous status. In the popular mind, bureaucracy is often equated with government.

Scholars have noted two additional characteristics that became integral to states by the late nineteenth century. The first was nationalism, which denotes a sense of common identity among the inhabitants of a country and a sociopsychological allegiance to the state it represents. These sentimental attachments form the emotional fabric of a nation, which rests on a widespread sense of belonging to a cultural community by virtue of ethnic background, language, religion, and history. The synchronization of a nation with its formal civic apparatus results in a nation-state.⁵ Because nationalism helps empower a state’s capacity, elites attempt to cultivate popular attachment to the regime.

The other feature of states that became increasingly visible during the nineteenth century was the recognition of citizenship and rights. With the transition from kingly domains and colonies to nation-states, most notably in western Europe and North America, the inhabitants of a territory were transformed from the subjects of a ruler to citizens with rights and entitlements. Members of democratic states expect to vote for their leaders and to have their civil liberties protected. In return for these benefits, they recognize that they owe taxes to the regime and may be required to serve in the nation’s armed forces. Modern states, therefore, have formed complex relationships with residents regarding their rights and obligations.

The Dynamics of State Formation

The origin of the modern European state is entwined with the region’s history. Scholars debate the causes of its development, but there is agreement about the most prominent factors. All agree that the rise of the modern state was a historical process in which institutions and rulers reacted to and interacted with conditions that evolved over time. Only a close examination of specific episodes can reconstruct these sequences, but several general patterns can be summarized. The feudal arrangement that had dominated medieval Europe eroded after 1500 in the face of social, economic, and political pressures such as the Protestant Reformation, which challenged the political influence of Latin Christianity. Cities grew in wealth and size with the rise of commerce, spurring the formation of modern capitalism and the creation of economic interest groups such as merchants and bankers. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment offered new ideas about social and natural phenomena and posed alternatives to older orthodoxies.

Against this background statebuilding took shape within the more specific dynamics of change, none more critical than war. And no single military development was more instrumental in undermining the medieval political order than the invention of gunpowder and its use in cannon. This new technology, as well as personal firearms and oceangoing sailing vessels capable of mounting cannon, revolutionized military tactics and strategy. Cannon rendered castles and knights—the foundation of medieval warfare—obsolete. In place of small militias at the command of nobles and hired mercenaries, state leaders created military forces that relied on full-time paid armies and navies that trained regularly, were barracked separately from citizens, and were provisioned with modern arms. Maintaining this new coercive system was expensive, so regimes were forced to seek increased revenue, which they obtained by imposing new taxes and improving tax collection mechanisms. This demand stimulated the expansion of centralized political controls, principally by improving administrative capacities. The story of statebuilding between 1500 and 1800 evolved in large measure from the interactions among the creation of professional militaries, the adoption of revenue policies to support them, and the establishment of effective bureaucracies to coordinate the modernized military-fiscal complex. As Peter the Great, tsar of Russia (1682–1725), characterized this interaction: “money is the artery of war.” And as Philip Bobbitt observed, the state i...