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Four
The tableau which American society presents is, if I can put it this way, covered with a democratic coat, but beneath it from time to time the old colours of aristocracy break through.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Max Weber
Attribued to Paul R. Krugman reviewing American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush by Kevin Phillips in New York Review of Books, February 26, 2004
In its early years the United States of America was a classless society, and still cherishes that golden memory rather as European nostalgics – with less justification – still cherish a golden memory of feudalism in the Middle Ages. But it is important to emphasize that America was classless, not because of having got rid of classes but because of not having had them in the first place. True, early on, some of the independent states – and not only in the South – were on the verge of creating titles of nobility, but the War of Independence intervened to nip these aspirations in the bud, thereby ensuring that the citizens of the new Republic, in the event, were indeed conceived and born, in a manner of speaking, equal; by which I mean that theirs was a uniquely high quality of equality, a uniquely classy order of classlessness.
Not that it could have been otherwise, given the seventeenth-century provenance of the early Puritan and Calvinist settlers who adhered to the most morally select of all creeds, believing themselves to be equal in the same way as the biblical Israelites believed themselves to be equal: all equally chosen, that is, by God. But by no stretch of the imagination could such people be described as common. More plausibly they would have to be described as divine-right aristocrats who, being already lords of Christ, felt no need to become mere English lords; felt no desire to dress up in ermine or to live in palaces, or to put a crown upon their heads, or to have blue blood or noble quarterings, since they already had within them a spiritual superiority that transcended all such worldly baubles. True, there were no Puritan rulers or ruled; no domineering bishops or subservient laymen, and in that sense there was no hierarchy, except that most formidable hierarchy of all: between saints and sinners, between the saved and the damned.
It was not only a question of moral superiority since, intellectually and educationally, they were also in a class of their own. Professor Sheldon Wolin, in his excellent Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life-to which I am deeply indebted throughout this chapter – quotes the great French political philosopher as saying of the early Puritan settlers, ‘that they brought with them the most advanced “democratic and Republican theories”, an “austerity of manners”, “wonderful elements of order and morality”; a strict legal code, and all of “the general principles upon which modern constitutions rest”: citizen participation, especially in the voting of taxes, the accountability of officials, individual freedom, and trial by jury’. And another French commentator on early America was equally amazed at their standard of intelligence. According to Michel Chevalier, the mind of a French peasant was full of ‘biblical parables’ and ‘gross superstitions’, whereas the American farmer had been ‘initiated’ into ‘the conquest of the human mind’ that began with the Reformation. ‘The great scriptural traditions are harmoniously combined in his mind with the principles of modern science as taught by Bacon and Descartes, with the doctrine of moral and religious independence proclaimed by Luther, and with the still more recent notions of political freedom.’ The common people in America, unlike those of Europe, therefore, were fit to take part in public affairs. They did not need to be governed since they were able to govern themselves.
In early America every citizen also had relatively easy access to the ownership of land – which in Europe at that time was the essential qualification for gentlemanly status. So America from the very beginning was a property-owning democracy in which all citizens lived on their own land and were independent in their circumstances. Consequently, there were no peasants or proletarians. Under such conditions – conditions widely regarded as typical as late as the Civil War – it only made sense to speak of a labouring class and a leisured class if all citizens were included in both. True, strictly speaking, there were no gentlemen, but that was only because there were no commoners either. So in early America not only was every citizen his own priest – master of his soul – and his own sage – master of his mind – but also master of his own estate.
Most important of all, of course, there was the brute fact of black slavery, which meant that even the humblest and poorest white was born immensely superior by reason of belonging to a master race. What he had in common with the grandest and richest of his fellow freemen was incomparably greater than what he had in common with any black slave. A similar white sense of racial superiority existed in the Old World as well, but not to anything like the same extent. There, it was at least partially mitigated by considerations of class: that is to say, a white English labourer would not by any means necessarily regard himself as the superior of a black king or chief. Indeed when the pre-Enlightenment English explorers first encountered the native North Americans in the seventeenth century they unquestioningly credited them with operating the same kind of civilized hierarchical social system as their own. They therefore accorded royal status to black and brown leaders, aristocratic status to the sub-chiefs, and so on and so forth down the social scale.
By the time United States was born, however, such old-fashioned ideas, which ignored all the new, supposedly scientific, discoveries about all blacks and browns being inferior to all whites, seemed as out of date as believing that the earth was flat. To Enlightenment Man it was a self-evident truth that black and brown savages were not the equal of whites; indeed it was a self-evident fact that, by all the Enlightenment criteria – education, culture, literacy, etc. – they were immeasurably inferior. This, at the time, was not a reactionary view. Quite the opposite: it was at the cutting edge of scientific thought. Except to a crazy romantic like Rousseau, it was clearly the sheerest nonsense to treat a naked jibbering Caliban as if he was noble. In any case the American, true to his Enlightenment principles, no longer believed in kings, princes, and aristocrats. So, far from the existence of a social hierarchy among ‘the brutes’ –as even Edmund Burke called them – being seen as a mark of their civilization, it was taken as further and conclusive proof of their incorrigible backwardness. Not so, however, in Britain, where it was seen as their redeeming feature –at least when doing so served the purposes of Britain’s governance, as it very often did. To illustrate Britain’s mixture of pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment attitudes, David Cannadine, in his invaluable Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire, tells the following story:
In the summer of 1881 King Kalakaua of Hawaii was visiting England and, in the course of an extensive round of social engagements, he found himself the guest at a party given by Lady Spencer. Also attending were the Prince of Wales, who would eventually become King Edward VII, and the German Crown Prince, who was his brother-in-law and the future Kaiser. The Prince of Wales insisted that the [Hawaiian] King should take precedence over the Crown Prince, and when his brother-in-law objected, he offered the following pithy and trenchant justification: ‘Either the brute is a King, or he’s a common or garden nigger; and if the latter what’s he doing here?’
Such ambivalence continued to the very end of the Empire. I remember Harold Macmillan during his valedictory tour of Africa in 1961 – no previous serving prime minister had ever visited these south-Saharan colonies and his visit was only to wave them goodbye – telling the accompanying reporters, of whom I was one, how much more at home he felt staying in the Palace of the Sarduana of Sokoto, the black hereditary ruler of Northern Nigeria (whom he affectionately compared to a Scottish Highland chieftain) than he expected to feel when staying – his next port of call – with the white Prime Minister of the Central African Federation, Roy Welensky, a former engine driver and boxing champion. So far as Britain was concerned, class consciousness always counted for as much as, if not more than, race consciousness. There again the English penchant for snobbery served a benign purpose. For while enslaving non-royal Africans might or might not be morally repugnant, enslaving African kings quite definitely smacked of lèse majesté. So, whereas the Old World principle of attaching a different status to individuals allowed at least some blacks and browns to escape humiliation on the basis of colour or race, the New World’s refusal to recognize any of the old feudal distinctions made sure that all blacks and browns were consigned equally to the dung heap, and all the white Americans given pride of place as members of an hereditary master race.
Right from the start, therefore, American citizens were the proudest of the proud, all equally superior to everybody else in terms of their Protestant religion, their Enlightenment scientific and political principles, and, above all, by the colour of their skin. Given so many fundamental superiorities in common it is scarcely surprising that such comparatively superficial material differences – that some lived in larger houses than others and owned more acres – paled into insignificance. In the things that really mattered they were equal, and the moral, religious, and intellectual bonds binding them together were infinitely more important than the wealth barriers dividing them.
So while, strictly speaking, a classless society, early America was not a society with which today’s anti-elitists would wish to identify themselves. For quite as much of the aristocratic principle – rule by the best – went into its formation as of the democratic principle, rule by the people.
This, I believe, was the aspect of early American democracy that impressed Tocqueville most: not, as is usually supposed, the absence of aristocracy but rather its unexpected presence, in particular the existence there from the outset of citizens willing and able to act and think disinterestedly and heroically about the destiny and freedom of the nation – the very role the French nobility had played in the Middle Ages before Louis XIV in the seventeenth century had reduced them to a coterie of courtiers. Indeed Tocqueville credited the Pilgrim Fathers with suffusing the early American Republic with a spirit of aristocracy from the very beginning: not aristocracy understood as a distinct political class empowered by the constitution to govern, but rather as a social, cultural, and religious force whose mœurs (his word) would always give American civil society the confidence to resist the centralized power of the State – something in the Old World only done successfully by an aristocracy – and ensure the active civic participation of the whole nation, with every citizen obliged, as aristocrats in the Old World had ideally been, to put the nation’s destiny before their own.
Before going to America, Tocqueville had simply taken it for granted that conditions of social equality could not possibly produce citizens of such exceptionally high political quality; such high-minded persons dedicated to the protection of the constitutional order itself, he assumed, could only be grown in a higher quality of social soil, one enriched by generations of power and privilege. The occasional ‘natural aristocrat’ might be found, rather as the occasional rare bloom is found growing wild in a country hedgerow; but inevitably such sports of nature would be few and far between. So for the numbers to begin to constitute a civil association powerful and bonded enough to energize and inspire a great nation only a hereditary nobility would suffice.
As a result of his visit to America, however, Tocqueville modified this view. For his experiences in early nineteenth-century America revealed to him a degree of civil virtue in townships across the land that convinced him that, given the favourable circumstances of the New World, ordinary citizens without any hereditary privileges could also practise these altruistic political virtues, not quite at the level of an inherited aristocracy perhaps, but at a level that would pass muster. The opportunities of the New World, he believed, had transformed bourgeois and plebeian geese into aristocratic swans, capable of amazing flights, not only of economic initiative but also of political innovation. Equally impressive and surprising, he noted, was the sophisticated citizenship displayed by non-political citizens who conscientiously and trustingly supported such initiatives and innovations. True, there were no peasants or proletarians in early nineteenth-century America where, as we have seen, access to the ownership of land – the mark of a gentleman in Europe – was relatively easy for all. But even so, except briefly in the southern states, there were no hereditary aristocrats either. No wonder, therefore, sailing down the Mississippi one day, he was happy to conclude that: ‘there is one thing that America proves conclusively and that which I have previously doubted: it is that the middle classes can govern a state’; by which he meant that in America the middle class would shoulder the aristocratic burden and themselves become witness to everything the New World so sadly lacked, which included high statesmanship, high culture, good taste and manners, grace and loyalty. To me that sounds rather like wishful thinking that inside the fat body of American democracy there was at least a thin spirit of aristocracy trying to get out; more than that, succeeding in getting out – particularly in the patrician-run ‘city states’ of Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York.
On his second visit to America, however, Tocqueville was much less impressed, if only because by then the onrush of industrialization was already beginning to put an end to Jefferson’s agrarian Utopia; already beginning to introduce enormous differentials of wealth between master and man, employer and employee, hirer and hired, the property owner and the property-less. The economic opportunities of the new continent were also proving even more tempting than he had supposed; so much more that such dreams as the middle class were dreaming had become more material than political, more selfish than altruistic, with the best and brightest more concerned to make money as employers exploiting their workers than to earn fame and glory as politicians directing the nation’s destiny. As a result, by the time Andrew Jackson came to presidential power in the 1830s, the new nation’s capital was beginning to resemble Babylon rather than Athens. But although these materialistic manifestations dented Tocqueville’s faith in the new democracy, he stuck optimistically to his central insight: that because the New World had never suffered under a quasi-feudal aristocracy, it had never had cause, as revolutionary France had had, to ferment so fierce a degree of anti-aristocratic rage as to dissolve respect for all forms of superiority – spiritual, moral, and material. So, as Professor Wolin puts it, ‘in a climate un-poisoned alike by irresponsible privilege and revolutionary rage, the American high achievers – clergy, rich merchants, lawyers, intelligentsia – could legitimately without guilt act as a galvanizing force and the low achievers – i.e. demos – without shame act as a moderating force.’
Such optimism about American democracy that survived Tocqueville’s second visit thus rested on the assumption that it was less likely than European democracy to want to drag everything down. For whereas in the Old World everything elevating and superior – from good manners to religion – had become suspect because of association with a discredited feudal system, in America all these splendid things could start again with a clean slate; without, so to speak, ‘previous form’. What did this mean in practice? It meant, for example, that unlike the aspiring European bourgeoisies who had found all the prestigious jobs in Church and State already monopolized by tenaciously ensconced noblemen, their American counterparts were lucky enough to find instead a vacuum at the top just waiting to be filled. No other national bourgeoisie had ever had such an easy run for their money or found so few obstacles – either of reactionary ideology or traditional privilege – blocking their way. Instead of being made to feel nouveau-riche parvenus or illegitimate upstarts, the American bourgeoisie, right from the start, could and did regard themselves as the genuine article, with no cause to develop chips on their shoulders.
By the same token, the absence of a feudal experience also worked wonders for the American working class, which, being unburdened by memories of institutional serfdom, was that much more easily persuadable that capitalist bottom-dogdom was the lowest rung of an ascending ladder and not, as their European counterparts had reason to fear, a preordained and inescapable fate. The absence of a feudal past not only enabled America’s bourgeoisie to feel more comfortable in their skins than their European counterparts, but enabled her working class to do so too. America’s industrialization, therefore, got off to a unique start: an owning bourgeois class without neo-feudal guilt about superiority, and a proletarian working class without shameful hang-ups about inferiority. For inequality, therefore, it was a miraculous turn-up for the book, providing at any rate its capitalist manifestation with a new world to conquer.
Tocqueville, an aristocrat himself, relished this New World lack of guilt about inequality, in such marked contrast to the French Revolution’s Jacobinical extremism, seeing in it a marvellous opportunity for the New World to replace an illegitimate form of inequality, sustained only by repressing the human spirit, with a modern republican spirit of inequality designed to liberate it. In the New World top democrats – appropriately republicanized into senators – had become once again acceptable, in the same way that kings had become suitably republicanized into presidents.
So without consciously willing it – indeed in spite of consciously willing the opposite – American democracy had released inequality from the burden of its feudal past. But so, to a lesser extent, had English aristocracy, the praises of which Tocqueville never ceased to sing. For it too – compared to its ancien régime counterparts on the Continent – had also gone a long way towards sharing power with the bourgeoisie; towards allowing the middle class to demonstrate its capacity to govern. These reassuringly non-populist – even and-populist – democratizing processes, ...
