Indecent Liberties

Robert Schmuhl

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780268031572, 9780268012168
• eBook ISBN: 9780268092962
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This series of eight provocative essays examines why Americans have a penchant for going to extremes in their arts, popular culture, politics, social movements, and other aspects of life. Robert Schmuhl considers historical examples (the hunting of the buffalo in the West, Prohibition, business ventures in the Gilded Age) but concentrates on contemporary subjects, including the emphasis on what shocks the audience as entertainment today, tensions among specific groups, the decline of private life, and the excesses of news media coverage in the O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky stories.

Indecent Liberties explores the dangers and consequences of carrying fundamental American freedoms too far. In this environment, achieving a public good can get lost in a frenzy of private gain or a worthwhile idea can be pushed to unrecognizable boundaries, producing the opposite of its intended effect. When an attitude of "anything goes" takes hold, a sense of limits gets lost, and it is different to achieve harmony or a center that holds.

Especially as we face a new century with talk of "hyperdemocracy" and "hypercommunications" common in intellectual circles, Indecent Liberties argues that seeking equilibrium should be a central objective for all Americans. To go to wretched excess can lead to "indecent liberties" and wretched results that throw the country off balance and endanger the future. This book asks questions about today and yesterday that require answers for tomorrow.

This insightful analysis of a distinct American characteristic is for every reader concerned with America's penchant for going to extremes in ways that produce debatable, even deplorable, consequences.

LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF EXCESS

To wander across America is to see (if not quite believe) what Gertrude Stein meant when she wrote:

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.

This is what makes America what it is.

This sense of space, of vast and varied territory, extends backward in time to the first encounters between Native Americans and European settlers. From the perspective of those who risked everything for a different existence elsewhere, their New World offered not only a fresh start but endless elbow-room. To be sure, wilderness abounded. A squirrel, someone later remarked, could jump tree-to-tree from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without touching the ground. But the freedom coming from “more space” worked with other freedoms the settlers were nurturing, and it had lasting consequence.

The ability to pick up and move elsewhere to begin life anew became an American prerogative. Geographical abundance whetted other appetites, which the closing of the frontier near the end of the nineteenth century did not suppress and which were vividly described (among other places) in “tall tales,” with their emphasis on superhuman traits and reality-defying grandeur. The wide-openness of the land that over time became the United States helped create a love of bigness in other aspects of life. As a young Theodore Roosevelt asserted in a Fourth of July speech in 1886 out in the Dakota Territory, “ ... like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads—and herds of cattle, too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else.”

Roosevelt, however, went on to temper his pride with a warning that, in its way, continues to have resonance and meaning:

But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world. We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. (in Hagedorn, p. 410)

Using other words, TR is warning about going too far, of Americans sometimes wanting so much that acquisitiveness crowds out “virtue” (and all that might imply) along with other balancing characteristics.

What worried the irrepressible TR over a century ago has become even more troubling during the twentieth century. Indeed, to look at the whole sweep of American experience is to see a parade of excess in so many areas that trembling for the Republic in a collective St. Vitus’s dance might well be the appropriate response. As Charles Paul Freund remarked in The New Republic (March 27, 1989), as the 1980s—described as “The Decade of Excess” in several journalistic assessments—concluded: “Nothing in moderation has been our unofficial motto for a long time, with libertine and puritan subcultures leapfrogging each other to set the tone for an unstable mainstream. If nobody expects to stamp out all vices, major or minor, it seems nonetheless to be our cyclical puritan conceit to try. The desirability of tolerating small vices so as to avoid worse ones never seems to come up, one reason why other cultures—those that have shrugged off their own utopian conceits, and those who never had any—scratch their heads at us.”

In America and Americans, John Steinbeck is more blunt and personal in assessing his fellow citizens: “For the most part we

are an intemperate people: we eat too much when we can, drink too much, indulge our senses too much. Even in our so-called virtues we are intemperate: a teetotaler is not content not to drink—he must stop all the drinking in the world; a vegetarian among us would outlaw the eating of meat. We work too hard, and many die under the strain; and then to make up for that we play with a violence as suicidal.” Steinbeck’s scattershot criticism lacks nuance; however, he acknowledges the constant interplay between vices and virtues, a communion that becomes important in discussing the broader implications of American excess.

Interestingly, in case after case the origin of what ultimately gets taken to an extreme, even absurd, degree makes sense or seems well-meaning. Who, for example, could have predicted that the temperance movement would eventually lead to the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and to fourteen years of Prohibition? That organized crime became an ominous and continuing force in American life as a result of the government ban on alcohol is a case study of unintended consequences darkly overshadowing the good intentions of trying to correct a social problem by using political means. It would be impossible to argue that the extremism of the reform accomplished more good than the countervailing evil of illegality that took root and still flourishes. Actually, in retrospect, running contraband booze to fuel the Roaring Twenties seems a lesser sin than the other vices (gambling, prostitution, drugs) crime families became involved in as they amassed power during Prohibition.

As the historian Richard Hofstadter observes with characteristic insight (in the preface to Andrew Sinclair’s Era of Excess: A Social History of the Prohibition Movement) about the “ironies” of this period:

Before prohibition became law, the prohibitionists decried alcohol as a form of deadly poison. After prohibition was law, they approved the legal poisoning of industrial alcohol, knowing full well that men would die from drinking it. Excess had this way of turning things into their opposites: an amenity became a crime; the imposition of controls led to a loss of control; the churches created gangsters; reformers became reactionaries; purifiers became poisoners. Excess also made it impossible for the politicians to fulfill their customary function of compromising opposed interests and mediating between extremes. That some men may live by principle is possible only because others live by compromise. Excess destroyed this nice symbiosis: it converted the politician into a bogus man of principle, a breed of hypocrite who voted one way while he drank the other. (pp. vii-viii)

If hypocrisy is the politician’s cardinal sin, Prohibition was a time like no other. In the White House and elsewhere, the law was a joke, with less meaning than what resulted in response to it. Extremists won, but at what price?

It is difficult to imagine the nation’s founders debating—or even contemplating—legislation to outlaw alcohol. They not only had better things to do, they emphasized in their public work such classical virtues as restraint, simplicity, and balance. The Constitution, with its three branches of government set up to check abusive excesses of power, endures as a plea for equilibrium and for dividing the responsibilities of public business. In a 1798 letter, Jefferson cheered the prospect of state governments functioning in similar fashion to the federal system, operating “like the planets revolving round their common sun, acting and acted upon according to their respective weights and distances” to “produce that beautiful equilibrium on which our Constitution is founded. ...” Praising “a degree of perfection, unexampled but in the planetary system itself,” he went on to remark: “The enlightened statesman, therefore, will endeavor to preserve the weight and influence of every part, as too much given to any member of it would destroy the general equilibrium.” To attempt to go too far is to risk judicial or political correction. Franklin D. Roosevelt learned this from the Congress with its rejection of his scheme in 1937 to “pack” the Supreme Court with justices friendly to his initiatives. Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party lost control of both houses of the Congress in the mid-term election of 1994 in large measure as a reaction to his proposed healthcare plan that many voters perceived as overly intrusive and expensive.

At almost the same time as the Constitution was becoming the law of the new republic, Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography and other writings was championing personal traits he thought readers should follow in leading successful lives. In The Autobiography, he set down thirteen specific “virtues” and added “precepts” for amplification. Here are a few of his “virtues”:

¶1. Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

¶3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

¶5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself;i.e., waste nothing.

¶9. Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

¶12. Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation. (pp. 93-95)

Given what is now known of Franklin’s private life, including the existence of at least two illegitimate children, the remarks about chastity seem posthumously ironic. However, the “virtues” conform to the times and represent common, acceptable thinking for citizens establishing a nation unlike any other that previously existed. Individual freedom and liberty formed the cornerstone for political, economic, and religious actions, but personal virtues were expected to temper the extent to which the people enjoyed their freedom and liberty.

Despite the institutional impediments to governmental excess and the moral guidance of such celebrated figures as Franklin to maintain self-control, America’s earliest days were not without public and memorable examples of going too far. This phenomenon recurs with extravagant ostentation in the newspapers of that time. To be sure, many existed as megaphones for political interests, and participants in the partisan press knew that the sharper their criticism of the opposition, the greater the potential impact on the reading public.

Franklin’s own grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, represents the approach often taken in what were then called “the public prints.” Writing for the Philadelphia Aurora, Bache left lit-tle doubt about his thinking—and what he said strikes someone today as at a certain variance from the restraint or control of his grandfather’s virtues. For example, you might expect a valediction—however modest or even grudging—when George Washington left the presidency. No, in the March 6, 1797 Aurora, Bache sent the father of the country to his retirement at Mount Vernon by saying: “ ... the man who is the source of all the misfortunes of our country, is this day reduced to a level with his fellow citizens, and is no longer possessed of power to multiply evils upon the United States. If ever there was a period for rejoicing, this is the moment—every heart in unison with the freedom and happiness of the people ought to beat high, with exultation that the name of Washington from this day ceases to give a currency to political iniquity, and to legalize corruption.” Bache continues with a bill of particulars, building to “this day ought to be a jubilee in the United States.”

The First Amendment, of course, permitted journalists to criticize anyone perceived as a political opponent with impunity. A free press coexisted with other fundamental freedoms. Even before the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, Thomas Jefferson observed, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.” Two decades later and near the end of his second term as president, Jefferson had been on the receiving end of so many journalistic brickbats (and the subject of so many scandalous rumors) that his mind has decidedly changed. In a letter he wrote: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time. ...”

In the two statements of Jefferson, there is what proves to be a recurring pattern in most cases of American excess. Abstract idealism (in this case sparked by the potential good of journalism serving as a sentinel on watch over government) loses out to the realities of daily, continual action. Freedom (again, in this case, the sanctioning approval of the First Amendment) allows those who are involved in a particular effort or cause to operate from an extreme position. Like the example of Prohibition, the movement from original idea to ultimate execution becomes a process of reducing whatever salutary effects there might be, with the larger consequences far removed from those initially envisioned. As journalism developed and matured, political partisanship gave way to popular appeal of the Penny Press and other forms of mass communication. Instances, even periods, of excess occurred in journalism, notably the Yellow Press days a century ago and the tabloidization of news we have so much with us in recent years.

In its own peculiar and lamentable way, slavery stands alone as a scarring illustration of carrying an idea or plan too far. Unlike Prohibition or journalistic excess that have (in theory, at least) justifiable starting points, slavery is indefensible no matter what. To think that slave owners would use their freedom to deny it to others is not only morally incongruous but opposed to basic American principles. However, here we come back to the great expanse of land available for agriculture and other settlement described earlier. Such back-wrenching work demanded the persistent toil of thousands of people, with slavery becoming the preferred, most efficient method, especially (of course) on large Southern plantations.

Free-market capitalism occupies a central place in the history of slavery in America, and similar capitalistic objectives (existing within cycles featuring periods of boom and bust) drive other excesses both past and present. That it took the Civil War and its grotesqueries to finally resolve the question—and evil—of slavery should be proof enough of how damaging something carried to such an extreme can be.

However, as Paul Johnson notes in A History of the American People, “The end of the Civil War solved the problem of slavery

and started the problem of the blacks, which is with America still.” Today some of the loudest voices in the African-American community talk of the need for resegregation, the pulling away as much as possible from mainstream American culture and society for the sake of Afrocentric living. To reject the possibility of integration or assimilation is a contemporary expression of extremism as troubling as any white racist’s call for separation based on some unfounded fantasy of superiority. The same environment of free thought and free speech incubates both views, which operate on the margins of American life.

Besides the Civil War in the nineteenth century, blood flowed freely in the West as settlers pushed from the Atlantic region to the Pacific Ocean. The phrase “the winning of the West” (which Theodore Roosevelt used for his multivolume history) and the popular 1962 movie titled How the West Was Won imply losers in the process, and losers there certainly were. More recent scholarly works—such as Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987), Richard White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (1991), David E. Stannard’s American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World(1992), and Paula Mitchell Marks’s In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession and Survival (1998)—chronicle the consequences of westward expansion on native inhabitants, wildlife, and natural resources. The concept of conquest—of certain people overcoming, if not overwhelming, certain other people or forces to gain control—pervades the latest interpretation of what actually happened as the frontier territories became new states of the United States. Romantic western films, featuring battles between “cowboys and Indians,” might continue to entertain, but their relationship to reality is at best tangential.

In coming to terms with American excess, the story of the near extermination of the bison or buffalo on the western plains stands out in bold and bloody relief. To think that an estimated seventy million bison roamed this country’s land in 1800 and that only a few hundred remained a century later tests believability. Yet, for several reasons germane to this argument, the so-called “great buffalo hunt” went to that extreme. Free-market economic objectives to exploit an abundant resource subsequently converged with a cruel governmental strategy to control—or, if you will, conquer—Native Americans in the West, leading to unchecked slaughter of herd after herd of buffalo, death without end.

Early in the nineteenth century, as Wayne Gard tells it in The Great Buffalo Hunt, hunters went after buffalo for the value of their hides—about a dollar per hide. The meat from literally millions of buffalo was left to rot or to feed scavenger animals and birds. The hunters’ work helped clear land that ranchers later used for sheep and cattle. Yet what was beneficial to hunters and ranchers proved devastating to the Native Americans of the plains. These American nomads relied on the buffalo for much that they needed—food, clothing, and shelter. Bones were even fashioned into tools. Besides the utilitarian nature of the animal to Native Americans, there was a spiritual dimension as well. An afterlife in a land abundant with buffalo was an abiding prospect of paradise among certain tribes. A white bison on earth assumed sacral power.

Given these peoples’ reality and reverence, is it any wonder why they kept attacking those they perceived as the killers of their most precious resource? Winning the West became, in part, white people’s sport with consequences reaching beyond the slaughter of a particular animal. As Doug Peacock observes in Bison: Distant Thunder: “The decision to exterminate the bison was semi-conscious. The conflict by white settler with Indians over land control was resolved when official policy linked the two: to exterminate the Indian you only needed to exterminate his commissary, the buffalo. The Army handed out free ammunition to anyone; any dude who could ride the railroad could now shoot buffalo from the train, leaving them to die and rot by the thousands.”

By the late 1860s and early 1870s, when around fifteen million bison still roamed the prairies, legislative proposals in the U.S. Congress, states, and territories sought to end the wanton carnage. But these appeals had little to no effect, with the legal measures passed receiving no enforcement. In 1873, Columbus Delano, Secretary of the Interior under President U. S. Grant, wrote in an official report: “I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect upon the Indians. I would regard it rather as a means of hastening their sense of dependence upon the products of the soil and their own labors.”

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Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF EXCESS
• THE UNSETTLING OF AMERICA
• AMERICA AND MULTICULTURALISM
• ALLIES OR ENEMIES?
• RUNNING SCARED
• COPING WITH HYPERDEMOCRACY AND HYPERCOMMUNICATIONS
• BEING PRESIDENT WHEN ANYTHING GOES
• SEEKING EQUILIBRIUM AND A CENTER THAT HOLDS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• WORKS CITED