For native and immigrant alike America meant something unique in world history; it is a uniqueness that Americans have taken pride in, and Europeans acknowledged. But now, at the very moment when the United States is the premier world power, many Americans and Europeans find themselves doubtful of the viability of the American credo: where once there was hope and confidence there is widespread pessimism and cynicism about “the American promise.” However, as Golo Mann here points out, this need not be; the American credo still possesses untapped sources of vitality, and American uniqueness may yet be the foundation for a universal humanistic politics.
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Of late it has become customary to consider the United States a conservative country—even the most conservative, the one remaining conservative country. In the words of a brilliant young historian: “From some standpoints the United States looks like the relic of an old society stranded in a new one. In the tormented postwar world the United States has emerged as the home of true conservatism.”
There is something shocking and immensely paradoxical in this description of the United States as conservative, indeed as “archaic” (H. Stuart Hughes uses this term)—this country which was for so long the asylum of revolutionaries and the despair of kings, the country in which Tocqueville saw in 1832 what Lincoln Steffens saw in Russia ninety years later: a society without a past, but presenting the universally valid pattern of the future. Instead of the old cities and monuments of Europe, America, when it entered the scene of history, possessed the new, vast democratic kingdoms of recreation and adventure; the deserts, the mountain ranges, and forests of the West. America was all future and no past. Here, conservatism never really could develop, because there was nothing to look backward to.
Indeed, conservatism in America has been, in most cases, nothing but frozen revolution, 18th- or 19th-century liberalism petrified. It has had little to do with Burke’s sentimental love for the past, with the cool and sad wisdom of Tocqueville, with the agonized cultural anxieties and bitter warnings of Jacob Burckhardt. When Burckhardt’s Reflections on World Histor were published in New York in 1943, they were unmercifully taken apart by a great Republican daily as a product of a viciously anti-democratic and pessimistic mind! I also remember the irreverent laughter of a group of California students—who considered themselves conservatives—when they read Burke’s lamentation on the death of chivalry. Instinctively they mistrusted Burke and sided with Tom Paine, with the European who had broken with the past as against the true European conservative. And was not every European immigrant in the 19th century—regardless of avowed political ideology—an incarnate protest against the Old World?
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It has often been observed, recently by Myrdal and by Hofstadter and only yesterday by Hughes, that the American nation is united—more firmly and more consciously than any other—by a common belief. It can be briefly stated: Equality under the law and under God. Equal opportunity for all. Free, restless activity of each for the improvement of his own condition, and a belief that his own interest will spontaneously harmonize with the interests of others for the common good. As little government as possible. As little foreign policy as possible. A refusal to admit the existence of conditions and problems not susceptible of being solved through good will and reason. Such was Jefferson’s belief in the 18th century and Herbert Hoover’s in the early 20th.
American politics was made on the basis of this common credo, seldom against it. The spokesmen of the minorities, the populists, the progressives, the belligerent publicists and “muckrakers,” shared it with their enemies, the presidents of the great corporations and the official dignitaries of the state. The principle itself was never at stake. The question was: who stood for it consistently and concretely, and who merely proclaimed it rhetorically while betraying it in fact? There was nothing similar here to the battle between two irreconcilable ideologies which has kept France divided ever since 1792. The ideas of the American Revolution ruled the New World without challenge.
The age-old discussion concerning the sources of the American credo can never produce any simple answer. The notion of democratic equality has one of its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, while the Declaration of Independence resounds with the fashionable secular vocabulary of the Enlightenment. In any case, however, liberalism and democracy in America were bound to develop into something different, and consciously different, from what they were in a Europe blessed and cursed by having a history.
Two of the profoundest thinkers of Europe, Tocqueville and Acton, have held that freedom cannot last without some form of aristocracy. Though in America, too, such thoughts were cautiously brought forward by conservative thinkers at the time when the Republic was born, they did not survive their initial exposure to the new atmosphere, and the community moved to the business of the day without paying much attention to them. A continent had to be conquered, explored, built up to provide work for all and an equal chance of happiness for all. Americans were conservative only in that they held on to certain basic democratic principles, regarded them as established in this land for all time; everything else was expected to change, improve, expand indefinitely.
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There are two classical prophecies concerning the relations between the Old and the New World: according to one, Europeans would sooner or later follow the American example and establish a European federal republic; according to the other, America was in danger, through overpopulation, industrialization, and class conflicts, of coming to share all the miseries of the Old World—the Old and the New could not meet without disaster. Franklin and Washington gave the classic formulation to the first, Jefferson to the second; and it is the Jeffersonian view that has, in the main, dominated American thought.
Jefferson clearly reveals the parochial aspect of the American belief in progress: he had a cold contempt for the past—that is, the European past—and for European society in its two extremes: court and nobility on the one side, metropolitan mob on the other. Later, when American industry emulated and surpassed the British, Jefferson’s anti-urbanism could not be seriously insisted upon. But the antithesis, America vs. Europe, persisted. For the industrialization of America did not bring with it, as in Europe, the theory and practice of the class struggle. The two extremes which Jefferson so disliked took the form of European conservatism and European revolution; both were equally distasteful to the Americans. According to the American view, Europe was free at any moment to Americanize herself, to get rid of her narrow borders and continual wars, her standing armies, her kings and class differences. But perhaps things were too old and hopelessly corrupt over there, beyond any possible improvement, and perhaps the golden mean of well-regulated freedom and peaceful progress was reserved for a happier and younger hemisphere.
Thus developed what among historians came to be called “American exceptionalism.” In the diplomatic sphere the Monroe Doctrine became its classical expression. America was better; America was in any case different; that laws of history of the Old World did not apply here. Exceptionalists have often been among the most ardent democrats, glorying in progress and fighting for the rights of man; they have been philosophers like John Dewey, historians like Charles Beard, politicians like George W. Norris and the older La Follette. Yet it was from the last named that the European policy of President Wilson met the most dangerous, because intellectually the most significant, opposition. With imperialists of the type of Lodge the president might have been able to come to terms; with the progressives, the exclusively American progressives, there was no possible understanding. The belief in American exceptionalism could, and often did, degenerate into isolationism.
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Charles Beard’s American history expresses even in its title the spirit of the undertaking: The Rise of American Civilization—as something different from and independent of European civilization. It is not strange, then, that the term “Atlantic Community” was first coined by the aristocratic and pessimistic Henry Adams, whereas the very American and democratic Beard refused to see the need for such a community and spoke of the bloody follies of the Old World with pity and contempt. When the United States was finally drawn into the maelstrom of the Second World War, America’s most representative historian discovered no other cause for the disaster but the treacherous action of a few men in high office. Admirers of Charles Beard did not understand this: how could the author of The Rise of American Civilization descend to the well-documented platitudes of President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War? But the spirit of both works is consistent. America, Charles Beard believed, was isolated, free, master of her fate. To Americans, as a nation, nothing could happen that they did not want; and war they certainly did not wish for. So how could a catastrophe of Old World destructiveness and stupidity befall the United States without treachery in high office?
Similarly, though on a different intellectual level, I have found that American college students have little sense for the tragic in history, for vital conflicts in which both sides are “right” so that a solution through violence becomes inevitable. That there may be such conflicts the American War between the States ought to be enough to show; but since it was an altogether successful operation, ending in the complete victory of one side and followed by an unprecedented industrial expansion, the defeated, in retrospect, inevitably appeared to have been in the wrong. Even Woodrow Wilson, the moralist historian, was not free from this abasement before the march of history when he announced that the South was right legally but wrong historically. German historians have, in other circumstances, said as much.
There has been in America, as in Germany, a certain readiness to identify success and right. Since Americans sincerely believed themselves to represent the best, most rightful of institutions, and since they had never really lost a war, it would have been superhuman for them to have escaped the optimistic fallacy. The best, most hard-working man in the country was successful, and so were all good men; likewise successful was the best, most hard-working country. If somehow, somewhere, violent conflicts developed, one side at least must be completely in the wrong; the task was to eliminate it, so that the conditions of free, peaceful competition and progress could be quickly restored. In this way both world wars were interpreted; and now American public opinion is once again concentrating upon one single extraordinarily evil power that alone impedes the spread of peace and progress.
But, despite surface similarities, nothing has been farther from the American historical mind than power-worship of the nationalist, Hegelian, or Marxian type. For Americans, the good cause always won. But it was not good because it won, as German historians believed; it won because it was good: “Power politics,” to Americans, was the mark of Cain borne by the Old World. But that the great republic existed, that the great republic always grew, always succeeded—this seemed a manifestation of the divine plan. If Europe was continually in the throes of failure, that was a divine chastisement for the error of its ways.
That Charles Beard was representative of the American ethos and Henry Adams an unhappy outsider—this much, at least, every American critic would admit. Adams himself considered himself an outsider. In Europe he would not have had to. In the intellectual world of Taine, of Burckhardt, of Nietzsche, it was an accepted attitude to distrust one’s own age and its creations. Adams, the American, did not dare to systematize his thoughts and forebodings. His keenest prophecies, intutions of an agonized historical sensitivity, are found in his letters, not in his books. If Henry Adams paralleled Burckhardt, his brother Brooks Adams anticipated Spengler, but without Spengler’s shrill success. From a publisher’s standpoint, The Law of Civilization and Decay was written half a century too early. It is the type of book which would have created a sensation in Europe after the First World War—and in the United States in 1950.
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For today it is different. Today it is felt that the Jeffersonian version of the American creed stands in need of revision; that it rested on transitory conditions; that a philosophy which served a broad continent so well for so long a time is too simple for the wide, confused world it is now called upon to understand and to inspire.
At an American college, the graduating class was recently asked to put down its thoughts of the idea of progress. The students were men between twenty and thirty, mainly from well-to-do families, and from the state of California. Enormous in its inner growth, dominated by the automobile and by progressive education, California is one of the most optimistic, least historically-minded of states. But these privileged young people were not so certain of their present and future good fortune. The great majority denied the truth of the idea of progress, regretfully rather than cynically. In their papers one could find all those arguments which have long since been familiar to European pessimism, but which one could hardly have expected at this place, from this source. The United States, they wrote, was particularly privileged, but the difference between America and the rest of the world had already lost much of its significance and was bound to lose more in the future. Technical progress was not necessarily progress toward the good. Greater power was not greater freedom. We Americans, they wrote, are today incomparably more powerful in the world than fifty years ago, but we have not therefore become more free in the fashioning of our own life; rather the contrary. One student actually held that men have never been as unhappy as they are today. Others tried to distinguish, to introduce nuances; they tried, in their modest way, to propose those revisions of the ancient creed without which it cannot stand the onslaught of our times.
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This much is plainly true: unrevised, the Jeffersonian American credo is not adequate to interpret the experiences of the 20th century. Consequently, those who adhere to it unperturbed are not really talking to the point Two examples may stand for the credo in its unrevised form: the, so to speak, official philosophy of the National Association of Manufacturers, and the opinions of the circle around Mr. Henry Wallace.
When one listens to the speeches offered at a regional meeting of the NAM one has the feeling of wearing Hans Christian Andersen’s magic galoshes and of being carried back into the mid-Victorian period. These are not Machiavellian strategists of the class struggle, as some of their European colleagues undeniably were and are, but Christian gentlemen, community leaders who give 3 considerable part of their income to charitable enterprises and show a praiseworthy interest in the welfare of their employees. But they have drawn no conclusions from the economic experiences of the last decades. The great depression will not be mentioned. The federal government appears as a hostile intruder into realms that are none of its business, an obnoxious initiator of outlandish aberrations; the less it makes itself noticeable the better it will be. If only the individual can work unimpeded by the state, if he will exert himself and save, he can and will succeed; and his success will not only be in his own interest, but will serve the interest of the community as well. This and this alone is the American way. For what is socialism if not the newest form of totalitarian tyranny which, as priest-domination, as feudalism, absolute monarchy, or revolutionary dictatorship, has plagued Europe and Asia since the origin of time?
Henry Wallace, on the other hand, keeps stressing the duty of the state to act as guardian over the economic life of the nation. In America this is often regarded as socialism, although Wallace has repeatedly insisted that he wants merely to protect the independent farmer and the small business man against the giant corporations. Actually his whole economic philosophy is nearer to the populist traditions of America than to the socialist traditions of Europe. Even more unmistakably American is Wallace’s belief in the good genius of the man in the street, his cult of the “common man.” Woodrow Wilson blamed a few evil autocrats for the catastrophe of 1914, but was optimistic about the outcome: a world war would make the world safe for democracy. Wallace was equally optimistic about the outcome of the Second World War, and later he blamed a few particularly wicked business men in Wall Street for the new world tensions. With solemnity he informed us that the 20th century would be the century of the common man—without trying for a moment to define his hero more closely. He did not stop to consider that a “common man” might sometimes look like a midwestern churchgoer on Sunday, but that he might also have the ugly face which, say, the masses of the city of Vienna showed that day in 1938 when Hitler came to redeem them.
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This can only mean that certain lessons of recent history have not been learned in America—economic lessons, political, moral, human lessons. An ancient credo is proclaimed in its entirety as if nothing had happened but a few accidents, unpleasant, to be sure, but easily to be eliminated.
There is, however, another side to the picture. There is the real danger that a belief which is recognized as inadequate in some respects may be abandoned altogether, to be replaced by some modish fatalism or nihilism. An all too eager curiosity, an excitability of the mind, makes us ready to cast all traditions to the winds and buy up the inventions offered by an intellectual quack. The sensational success of a book like James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution—a devil’s brew hastily concocted from Machiavelli, Marx, Spengler—is an example of this intellectual susceptibility. So was, not long-ago, the popularity of the pseudoscience of geopolitics. Power, in its most direct form of power to kill, as the ultimate if not the total rationale of politics, plays today a far greater part in the mind of the average American than the gloomiest prophets would have thought possible fifty years ago.
This is the danger of disappointed optimism, of suddenly lost illusions. It is in the United States, not in France or Italy, not even in Germany, that one can sometimes hear statements to the effect that “our civilization is finished” and that it would be best “to blow the whole thing up.” And it is in the United States that Realpolitik is most remarkably in vogue.
But it seems to me that the American tradition, redefined in terms of recent experiences, is vital enough to withstand the onslaught of international nihilism. We have not yet plumbed the deep of the American spirit.
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The Jeffersonian variant of American exceptionalism now belongs clearly to the past, and it seems, therefore, that even in the past it was not so complete as it seemed to earlier generations. The essays of the elder Arthur Schlesinger, for instance, which recently have been published under the title New Paths to the Present, consider mainly those trends which America shared with Europe through the greater part of the 19th century: industrialism, urbanism, nationalism, democracy, humanitarianism, and so on.
But there is, as we have mentioned, another aspect of American exceptionalism: what may be called the “universalist” concept of American exceptionalism, as expounded by Franklin and Washington, and according to which America was to be a guide and beacon to the Old World, pointing the way to the commonwealth of humanity. There is, moreover, an inner relation between this other, universalist kind of exceptionalism and the crisis of the 20th century. For the American republic was founded in the very spirit that first proclaimed the unique character of the modern historical situation of man. It was the revolutionary spirit of the last decades of the 18th century, the spirit of the Year One. The new republic was to set the example of the definitely right and true, worthy of imitation by all; such, for instance, was Immanuel Kant’s understanding. But this universalist exceptionalism had to do with the whole world of man, not with the privileged position of one particular region. This universal, global view has often been obscured in the course of the 19th century, but note how it has reappeared time and again at moments of crisis: under Lincoln, under Wilson, under Franklin Roosevelt. It is the type of exceptionalism which is adequate to the tasks of our age.
Thus, it is not by accident that the idea of world government or world federation, that most characteristic idea of the 18th century, is today nowhere so popular as in the United States. Nor do the American protagonists of world federalism fail to stress the parallel between the American emergency of 1787 and the world emergency of 1950.
They may even stress it too much. The tasks which the founding fathers had to master at Philadelphia were delicate enough, but they were child’s play compared with the obstacles standing between our present follies and genuine world union. Still, the historical legitimacy is there, the world federalists are continuing the best American tradition, while endowing it with a new significance. Earlier, Woodrow Wilson described his League of Nations as an adaptation “of the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world”—a weird, paradoxical definition, but not at all devoid of historical meaning.
No unwarranted optimism should inspire the propaganda efforts of the world federalists. The more serious among them do not follow the American Candide to whom everything is still for the best in the best of all possible hemispheres. Kant, their true master, at the same time that he was very near to the intellectual origins of the American republic, also knew much about the self-destroying possibilities of man. He condemned pessimism not because experience would not justify it—there was enough to justify it even in Kant’s time—but because to him pessimism was an unpractical and, therefore, an immoral attitude.
There are some traditionalists, such as Walter Lippmann, who want us to go back to Metternich rather than to Kant. They believe in the vitality of notions like “neutrality,” “buffer-state,” “balance of power.” Their books and newspaper columns are pleasant reading; but their charm is the delusive charm of escapism—like the escape into medieval towns, romantic tales, landscapes where we used to be at home but are no more. The recognition of the exceptional character of the present world situation is far more painful. It may lead to councils of despair, the idea of preventive war, or world empire. It may also lead to wiser recommendations, in the light of a great tradition.
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It is in part a matter of chance and taste, in what personality or what document we choose to see a living tradition at its best. Fighting Liberal, the memoirs of Senator George Norris, is a beautiful book, but too exclusively American; it is not subtle enough for this world in this decade. Lincoln Steffens’ autobiography is rich, shrewd, and generous, but sometimes shallow in its optimism, conceited, and unreliable in its moral judgments. Steffens was a magnificent mediator between the continents of the “Atlantic Community.” But he believed in Lenin, even in Mussolini; he is dead today. Henry L. Stimson, although only one year younger than Steffens, is far more alive. If I had to recommend to Europeans one single work as the truest and happiest expression of living “Americanism” in a changed world, I would not hesitate: I would choose Stimson’s On Active Service in Peace and War.
Stimson’s political memoirs have been evaluated in this country chiefly as a contribution to the history of diplomacy in the 1930’s and of the Second World War. They are that, and more. They contain a complete political philosophy—the “credo of a progressive conservative,” in the light of which the whole debate over free enterprise versus the welfare state appears abstract and irrelevant, and which makes the phrase “conservative American” mean something so different from “conservative European.” They are also a history of the 20th century, from McKinley to Truman, from the innocence of 19th-century isolationism to the One World of 1947. Stimson, the Republican, the New England patrician, the American mountaineer and explorer, early saw the flowing together of the streams of American and European history and strove hard to make his compatriots see it as well. To him, August 1914 marked the end of an era not only in European but in human affairs; after that time, his public activity was almost entirely devoted to issues arising from the fact that the United States cannot remain alone in the world. He tells his story with the utmost candor. He embellishes nothing; not the failure of his own principle, the “Stimson Doctrine,” which merely refused to recognize the fruits of lawless conquest; not the shame and misery of international politics of the 1930’s; not the horrors of war, including the atom bomb for the use of which he shared responsibility; not the grievous oddities of the Eastern ally. But this earnest and experienced statesman does not despair in the evening of his life. Practical and without illusions, he understood his age and all that was new in it, without abandoning the values that are rooted in an Americanism that is universal rather than parochial. These are his concluding words:
Those who read this book will mostly be younger than I, men of the generations who must bear the active part in the work ahead. Let them learn from our adventures what they can. Let them charge us with our failures and do better in their turn. But let them not turn aside from what they have to do, nor think that criticism excuses inaction. Let them have hope, and virtue, and let them believe in mankind and its future, for there is good as well as evil, and the man who tries to work for the good, believing in its eventual victory, while he may suffer setback and even disaster, will never know defeat. The only deadly sin I know is cynicism.
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