Understanding “
Anthony Mansueto
Introduction
The
This difficulty
in understanding the
This
essay is an attempt to do just that. It is intended first and foremost for those
in the rest of the world who are struggling to come to terms with the
dominating presence of the
I begin
by situating the American ideal in the context of Western modernity,
identifying two distinct “founding” traditions: a complex ideological ensemble
deriving from Puritanism and a moderate variant of Enlightenment humanism. I
then show how the internal contradictions within and between these tendencies
forced the creation of new kind of polity –one which brought together in a
common public arena advocates of fundamentally different variants of the modern
civilizational ideal. This sort of society was rendered possible by the
development of a network of what de Tocqueville and his followers have called
“intermediate or mediating institutions, in between the family and the state
which not only tempered individualism but also brought together people from
different social classes and ethnoreligious communities and different political
and theological orientations.
Both of
the American variants of the modern ideal were disappointed during the
nineteenth century –Jeffersonian humanism by the changes which accompanied western
expansion and Puritanism by the failure of the Civil War to finally create a utopia
of social justice and Protestant piety. Even so, the opportunities which the
I
conclude by arguing that the
Situating “
The Emergence of the Modern Ideal
“
There
was, to be sure, always another trend at work in medieval Catholicism, a trend
which looked more to Augustine than to Aristotle. This trend had a complex
social basis. On the one hand, it received support from elements in the
hierarchy who saw themselves as mediating divine grace through the sacramental
system. On the other hand it spoke powerfully to the Germanic warlords who ruled
medieval
Modern
“Western” Civilization emerged out of the crisis of the late middle ages.
Growing prosperity led to a shortage of land and ultimately to a series of
conquests –the Crusades, the Reconquista,
the conquests of Africa, the Americas, and eventually of Asia-- which
flowed more or less seamlessly out of the Germanic conquests which had brought
Western Christendom into being in the first place.[5]
The result was, on the one hand, the process of primitive accumulation which
made possible the industrial revolution and capitalist development and the
emergence of a new type of political formation –the sovereign nation state in
which a single lord exercised effective control over a territory and its
people.
These
new monarchs found Aristotelian philosophy with its natural law ethics an
unacceptable check on their exercise of this sovereignty, and thus supported
bishops who, like Stephen Tempier, helped catalyze an Augustinian reaction
which asserted ever more strongly the sovereignty of God and which stressed
more and more the sinfulness and radical dependence of human beings. This trend
soon found new support in the emerging bourgeoisie which, like the monarchy,
found natural law ethics an unacceptable constraint in its freedom of action.
It is
this notion of sovereignty which lies at the core of the modern ideal.
Originally, of course, it was the sovereignty of God which was at issue, with
human beings and especially the new absolute monarchs acting as his
vice-regents. This is the ideal of early modernity, as expressed in the
Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras. Gradually, however, something
peculiar happened, and this ideal was turned on its head. Augustinian
theologians from the thirteenth century onward had been critical of
Aristotelian science, with its emphasis on teleological explanation, because
they believed that it compromised the principle of divine sovereignty which was
so dear to them. Eventually, this resulted in a series of condemnations (the
most important being those by Stephen Tempier in 1270 and 1277) and a shift
away from teleological explanation in favor of mathematical model building
(Duhem 1909). It took nearly four centuries, but the result was the development
of a modern mathematical physics which seemed, at long last, to have unlocked
the secrets of nature and made it possible for human beings to use their
knowledge of the natural world to push back the limits of finitude and
gradually assert their own sovereignty over the natural world. This ideal was
extended by the Enlightenment to the organization of human society, something
which resulted in the displacement of royal by popular sovereignty through the
democratic revolutions. High modernity is the idea that human beings can
realize the end which earlier civilizations sought through spiritual discipline
–transcending or at least pushing back the limits of finitude— by means of
scientific and technological progress –by understanding how the world works and
using that knowledge to control it.
“American” Modernity
“
Second,
the
Third, the American identity has been shaped by at
two competing variants of the modern ideal –the Puritan variant of the early
modern ideal and a moderate variant of the Enlightenment ideal associated in
the popular imagination with “Jeffersonian” democracy. And these ideals
collided not just with each other but with the material and political economic
factors mentioned above.
It is to this story that we now turn.
Understanding Puritanism and its
role in the larger project of modern civilization is, of course, a locus classicus for modern social
theory, and our own approach does not reject Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis
out of hand. Unfortunately, Weber and his successors lacked the in-depth
understanding of the internal dynamics of Protestant Christianity generally,
and English Calvinism in particular, which would have been necessary in order
to comprehend the complex interaction between Puritanism and modernity.
The Protestant
Reformation is essentially just an extension of Augustinian reaction cited
above. Luther rejected decisively the idea that salvation is something we
achieve, even with the help of divine grace, by cultivating spiritual
excellence, and treats it instead as a free gift of a sovereign God. He also
rejected the idea that either reason or revelation has anything to say about
the social order. Any attempt to build a just social order will dilute the
gospel’s core message of forgiveness. Any extension of the ethic of forgiveness
into the social arena will give aid and comfort to a still largely unredeemed
humanity desperately in need of the repressive power of the state.
Luther’s
doctrine reflected the ideological needs of the emerging monarchies, which were
given a mandate to build strong states that could restrain the sinfulness of an
unredeemed humanity and were liberated from accountability to either natural
law or the radicalism of the ethics taught by the Jesus of the synoptic gospels.
Calvin’s doctrine, (Calvin 1536/1993), on the other hand, reflects the
situation of the emerging bourgeoisie. Calvin taught that grace not only
assured salvation to those who received it, but also transformed them into
instruments of God’s work in the world. While God chose, “before the
foundations of the world” those who would be saved, there were, in fact, signs
which indicated whether or not one was among the elect.
Weber’s
analysis of the ideological dynamics of Calvinism (Weber 1920/1958) has much to
commend it, but drawing as he did on a single text by a middle of the road
English Calvinist, Richard Baxter, he misses the internal diversity within the
Calvinist tradition around the question of just how, precisely, one knows
whether or not one is among the elect. Broadly speaking, Calvinists divided on
this question between those who stressed “usefulness to the community,”
something which some, in turn, understood to mean productivity in the economic
arena and others to mean a concern for religion and social justice, and those
who stressed the need for a convincing narrative of a personal conversion
experience. The New England Puritans were marked by, among other things, the
requirement that such a narrative of personal conversion be presented to the
existing members of the Church as a condition for admission to membership,
something which in the Massachusetts Bay and
It is
not possible in this context to trace out in detail the complex internal
struggles of the Holy Commonwealths. Suffice it to say that after the English
Revolution in 1640, radical Puritans were more inclined to stay home, where the
action was, and that the children of the original colonists, as well as many
newcomers, saw the colonies first and foremost as commercial ventures and were
more interested in making money and in advancing their social position than
they were in building Holy Commonwealths. Many of the children of the early
colonies leading lights were unable to fulfill the requirement that they give a
convincing narrative of their conversion experience, and were thus unable to
qualify for membership in the church and thus for the franchise. The result was
the “Half-Way Covenant,” which admitted the children of church members to
baptism and thus to the franchise, though not to communion, and eventually, the
reorganization of
Abandoning
historic Christianity did not, however, mean abandoning the sense of “election”
which had characterized the founders of
The
Great Awakening of the 1730s was, first and foremost, a response to this
growing liberalism and to the growing wealth and privilege of those who
espoused it. The poor, especially in the more remote regions still focused on
subsistence agriculture could not give any great evidence of their “usefulness
to society,” especially when this was interpreted to mean productivity and
wealth; but they could provide a convincing narrative of personal conversion.
North American Evangelicalism was, in other words, from the very beginning, a
movement of those who had been “left behind” by modernity. At least to begin
with this “evangelical” trend in American Protestantism did not reject the
struggle to build a better society. It was, rather, anxious to point out the
hypocrisy of the liberals, many of whom were involved in the slave trade or in
grabbing land from the Indians, and who were in general more concerned with
enriching themselves than with advancing God’s work of redemption. Indeed, up
through the Civil War, most evangelicals upheld what is known as a
postmillennial eschatology, which teaches that Jesus will return only after the millennium, i.e. only after
humanity, by means of personal conversion and social reform, as created a
just social order. Very early on, however, the evangelical trend itself began
to experience differences between those who stressed the purely subjective
character of the conversion experience, and placed relatively little emphasis
on transformed personal conduct or social reform, and those who, such as
Jonathan Edwards and his followers in the New Divinity movement, regarded
ethical conduct as the natural consequence and best indication of authentic
conversion and who were actively engaged in efforts to combat the evils of
American society, such as slavery and land speculation (Heimart 1966, Hatch
1977, Bryant 1983, Dayton 1983).
By the
middle or end of the eighteenth century, in other words, New England Calvinism
had developed from a relatively compact ideological trend into a complex
ideological ensemble containing at least four distinct trends. There was, on
the one hand, a liberal trend, which was less and less focused on historic
Christian doctrine and which regarded usefulness to the community as the best
indicator of election. The liberals in turn were increasingly divided between
those who regarded economic prosperity as the best evidence of usefulness to
the community and those who focused on efforts at social reform. These two
tendencies eventually gave birth to the Gospel of Wealth and the Social Gospel,
both of which remain important poles in the liberal Protestant spectrum. The
evangelicals, on the other hand, while united in stressing the importance of personal
conversion, were, in turn divided between the high Calvinists (and especially
the New Divinity movement) who believed that conversion had to bear fruit in
ethical conduct and social reform and what was originally a relatively small
group of back country revivalists who stressed a more purely emotional
conversion experience.
Anyone
who is familiar with the political and religious history of late colonial North
America, or with the period during and immediately after the Revolution knows
that these various trends despised each other and saw themselves locked in what
many regarded as mortal combat over the soul of the new “nation.” What they all
shared in common, however, was the idea that they were building something
qualitatively new and fundamentally superior to anything which existed in
Enlightenment Humanism
The second of the broad
traditions which contributed to the formation of the American identity is that
of the Enlightenment. It is, however, a very specific variant of Enlightenment
ideology which took root in
What
became the Enlightenment emerged out of a response of the philosophical
intelligentsia to the Augustinian reaction. In effect, when the elements in the
hierarchy which were allied to the emerging monarchies rejected the
accountability of theology to reason, philosophy responded by rejecting the
accountability of reason to a higher, revealed wisdom and opted instead for an
Averroist hermeneutic in which “revealed” religion was at best an imaginative
way of presenting truths which philosophy understands far better to the broad
masses who are unable to understand them.
From
this Radical Aristotelian starting point, what eventually became the
Enlightenment ideal underwent a number of permutations. It flourished first in
the economically advanced cities of Northern Italy and the
In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this humanistic orientation gave way to
an infatuation with the results of the scientific revolution, and thinkers like
Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz on the one hand and Locke, Berkeley, and Hume on
the other hand tried to re-invent philosophy on the model of either
mathematical physics or experimental science. The first, rationalistic trend
articulated the perspectives of the modernizing absolute monarchies, especially
on the continent of
Neither
of these tendencies was atheistic. Indeed, Descartes and Leibniz both had
strong ties to Augustinian theology, the first in Catholic and the letter in
Protestant contexts. Gradually, however, Enlightenment intellectuals and their
popular supporters developed their own organizational forms: Masonic lodges and
other secret societies, some of which eventually became the matrix for the
emergence of revolutionary organizations. These organizations in turn
increasingly came into conflict with traditional religious authorities, both
Catholic and Protestant.
We call
the American variant of this tradition moderate because it believed, at least
initially, that it would have the luxury of simply carving a new type of the
society out of the wilderness rather than engaging in revolutionary struggle
against the aging social forms of
The
economic engine which would make the realization of Enlightenment ideas
possible was universal land ownership and or universal small entrepreneurship.
This
Deistic/Masonic ideology was the guiding vision of what became the dominant
wing the Democratic-Republican Party, and echoes of it can still be heard, in
updated form in the rhetoric of the Democratic Party to this day.[7]
An Imperfect
It is not possible in this
context to consider in detail the factors which led what became the
This is
point is vitally important if we are to understand correctly the unique
“American” settlement of church/state questions. Among the founders were
moderate representatives of both the Puritan and Enlightenment ideals, and
among those they represented were more radical advocates of these ideals. Left
to their own devices some would have opted, if not for a
Two
texts from the early years of the Republic capture this almost accidental
creation at the moment of its birth. The first is the Federalist, written to garner support for the new constitution, and
especially Federalist 10, written by
James Madison. A reader literate in modern social theory, and especially in
historical materialism, is struck by just how close
The
second text which captures the unique character of the
John Winthrop (or Jonathan Edwards) and Thomas Jefferson (or
Tom Paine) may have been the conscious
architects of the twin variants of the American ideal, but it was Madison who
was the unconscious architect of Madison of the American reality and de
Tocqueville who was its best theorist.
From Republic to Empire
As might be expected, it was the
Enlightenment tradition which initially had greater popular appeal than the
Puritan ensemble, if only because its political program consisted in promoting
widespread land ownership and entrepreneurship. This, however, proved to be its
undoing. Partly because he wanted to expand opportunities for land ownership,
and partly out of a desire to help is ally Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson agreed to
acquire the
This
tendency for Enlightenment radicalism to become discredited was overdetermined
by the fact that the United States (contrary to what we are all taught in
elementary school, and what we relive every time we sing the Star Spangled
Banner) was on the losing side of the War of 1812, which was part of the
broader geopolitical struggle between the revolutionary French and the
reactionary English and Russians. Indeed, the violence of the French Revolution
had already done a great deal to discredit Enlightenment humanism as a
revolutionary ideology and the war itself was the occasion of America’s first
great red scare, the Bavarian Illuminati scandal, in which Federalist
politicians and Calvinist ministers from New England, most of whom opposed the
war and some of whom advocated secession, attempted to associate the
Democratic-Republican Party with a conspiracy of French-style revolutionaries,
Masons, and Jesuits to undermine true religion and the “American Way of Life
(Hatch 1977).”
These
developments did not kill the Jeffersonian tradition in the
This is
what happened to the rural, Jeffersonian variant of the radical Enlightenment
tradition in the
The
Industrial Revolution, which began to affect the United States in the 1820s and
1830s gradually broke down this pattern and created, first the first time,
large concentrations of workingmen who were not under the direct supervision of
their employers –who in turn, were becoming increasingly wealthy and socially
distant from those they employed. Taverns in particular emerged as centers of
an autonomous working class culture, at just the time when the use of alcohol
was becoming increasingly incompatible with productive employment.[11]
Johnson (Johnson 1978) has shown that the industrial revolution, the advent of
temperance movements, and the Second Great Awakening, all occurred at roughly
the same time in cities like Rochester in western New York which were among the
most important new centers of industrial development.
What the
Second Great Awakening did was, in effect, to hegemonize at least a part of the
emerging industrial working classes –that drawn from English stock and from
older immigrant groups which had been more complete assimilated. It did so by
means of an ideology which could no longer be called classically Calvinist.
Gone was the emphasis on predestination. Salvation was open to anyone who chose
it. Along with this went a commitment to perfection –both personal and
social—which at once tended to draw workers away from taverns and other centers
of autonomous working class culture and channel working class political energy
into bourgeois reform projects. The Second Great Awakening was, it should be
noted, closely aligned with the Anti-Masonic movement and with the
anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party.
While
these political-economic developments were undermining the integrity and
salience of the Jeffersonian vision, the macro-Puritan elite was at work in the
ideological arena. Universal public education was an integral part of the Jeffersonian
program and was hardly something that the New England Calvinist elite, with
their tradition of a literate laity and a learned ministry could oppose. But
they also did not want the schools to become agents of what they regarded as an
anti-Christian ideology, as they had in France. This is the origin of the
peculiar character of the United States educational system –far more extensive
far earlier than most European systems, but uniformly mediocre and reactionary.
It is possible to read in the debates in state legislatures during the early
and middle decades of the nineteenth centuries just how this happened.
Schoolteachers were not, under any circumstances, to be drawn from among the
graduates of elite universities where they might be exposed to foreign
ideological influences, but from normal schools where they would learn what
they needed in order to train a literate populace –but no more. The minister,
not the schoolteacher, was to be the intellectual leader of the local
community. And these normal schools would be kept away from the great cities
where foreign influences might creep in. The curriculum, kept closely under the
control of local elites, was to assimilate the people, and especially the waves
of new immigrants to an American (read macro-Puritan) identity. This is why
every child in ”America” grows up believing that his or her ancestors came over
on the Mayflower, seeking religious freedom, when in fact the Mayflower brought
only a tiny group of dissenting Puritans who even the founders of Massachusetts
Bay thought were lunatics … (Lasch 1995, Brouilette 1999).
This
whole complex of developments, which seemed to so favor the Puritan over the
Enlightenment variants of the American dream all came to a head in the middle
of the nineteenth century as a growing section of the bourgeoisie moved
gradually into the antislavery camp. North and South had longstanding
differences over questions such as tariffs and state expenditures on
infrastructure, both of which were essential to the emerging industrial economy
of the North and both of which threatened the South’s position in the global
economy as an agricultural exporter. And the Northern bourgeoisie had never
been entirely comfortable with slavery. But for a long time, these tensions
with the South were balanced by the need for cheap cotton. Gradually, however, industry
developed to the point that its need for free workers and an internal market
loomed larger than its need for cheap raw materials and the Northern
bourgeoisie gradually came to the view that slavery, one way or another, would
have at least to be contained, and preferably come to an end.
The
result of this process was the formation, under the aegis of the new Republican
Party, of a broad alliance of industrial capitalists, commercial farmers in the
old Northwest (what we now call the Midwest) and part of the urban proletariat
and petty bourgeoisie (the part hegemonized by the Second Great Awakening) on a
platform of commitment to containing or ending slavery, expanding access to
land for prospective yeoman farmers, high tariffs, and state investment in
infrastructure and education. Thus, by the time of the Civil War, the more
modernized part of the rural population, as well as a significant part of the
urban population of the United States was firmly bound to the industrial
bourgeoisie, and its principal hopes for upward mobility linked firmly to the
imperial project of westward expansion. All of this was articulated through a
rhetoric which linked the concerns of liberal Protestants and (postmillennial)
evangelicals in a way which was inspiring to both. One need only think of the
Battle Hymn of the Republic to understand the power of this vision.
But as
was the case with other bourgeois revolutions, the full promise of the
Republican Program of 1860 was never realized. A complete capitalist
transformation of the United States would have involved not only an end to
slavery but expropriation and redistribution of the lands of the southern
plantation owners. This was, in fact, the program of the Radical Republicans,
who represented the emerging steel and railroad industries, but the proposal
won only 37 votes in the House of Representatives. The older section of the
bourgeoisie based in the New England textile industry, was too deeply dependent
on cheap cotton to liquidate entirely the southern plantation system. Indeed,
after 1876, the Union withdrew its troops from the South and allowed the
southern landed elite to reconstitute itself on the basis of tenant rather than
slave labor. Indeed, between 1876 and 1908 the industrial bourgeoisie ruled, in
effect, in coalition with the Southern Landed elite in what Barrington Moore
has called an American version of the Prussian alliance of iron and rye (Moore 1966: 141-155).
The
disillusionment which resulted from the failure of the bourgeoisie to complete
the promised redemption of the “nation” cannot be underestimated. As we noted
above, most American evangelicals up until the Civil War were
postmillennialists and regarded the creation of a just social order as the
essential precondition of the second coming of Christ and thus an integral part
of God’s work of redemption. The struggle against slavery was seen as the
leading edge of that process. God really was sifting out the nations beneath
his judgment seat --and the Union armies were to be the agents of that
judgment. When the promised redemption failed to take place the old Evangelical
United Front began gradually to dissolve, with some drifting towards the
liberal gradualism which eventually became the Social Gospel movement and
others abandoning their postmillennial eschatology in favor of what eventually
emerged as modern fundamentalism (Marsden 1980). This new, fundamentalist
evangelicalism was based on a dispensational premillennial eschatology. According
to this view, God deals differently with humanity during different periods. The
ministry of Jesus, up until the time of his crucifixion, was part of the
dispensation of the law, and Jesus’ moral teachings with their profound social
implications are essentially part of a superceded Judaism. Humanity is living
now in the age of grace, when salvation is by faith, not works. What is more,
rather than leading naturally to moral uplift and social reform, personal
conversion has no really visible moral or social effects. Far from looking
forward to the creation of a just society, the new fundamentalism expected the
world to get worse and worse until Jesus came to “rapture” the elect and redeem
it.
This new
fundamentalism had a social base very different than that of the old
Evangelical United Front. While evangelicalism had always spoken to those who
were “left behind,” it did so at least in part because it promised a better
world, and not only in the beyond. Evangelicalism had, been, in other words, an
ideology of those who hoped to make America keep its promises. In this regard
it overlapped very substantially with liberal Protestant reformism. Now,
increasingly, it spoke to those who recognized that high modernity (they never
said “America” or “capitalism”) had no use for them and their way of life and
who felt, furthermore, that the proposals of liberal reformers and socialists, far
from offering a more humane modernity, simply promised a more vigorous effort
to extinguish their way of life.[12]
For broad layers of the rural population in the South and West and for the
petty bourgeoisie and even small capitalists of the smaller cities and towns,
“progress,” whether understood in the capitalist or the socialist sense, meant
only further attacks on their way of life. And so they dug in their heels and
resisted and waited for Jesus. They are still waiting.
The one
politically significant exception to this pattern was, of course the African
American people who, alone among the members of the old Evangelical United
Front have retained both their evangelicalism and their commitment to social
reform. Black evangelicalism has, to be sure, always been different from its
“white” counterpart. As Eugene Genovese pointed out long ago, African Americans
never really bought into the doctrines of original sin and double
predestination (Genovese 1974). The Black community has, however, always had a
deep sense of the degrading effects of oppression on personal morality.
Personal conversion in this context means getting your act together and
learning to live productively and creatively in the world as it is while
struggling for a better world. The result has been that African Americans,
while more than willing to point out the shortcomings of the United States are,
perhaps more than any other group in the country, true believers in “America,”
and are so in more nearly the classical Puritan sense than any other
ethnoreligious community. As anyone who has attempted to organize in the African
American community has discovered, it is one thing to call “America” to task
for her sins; it is quite another to attack the American ideal. And a
commitment to capitalism remains, for the most part, an integral part of this
idea. It was only much later, with the failure of the civil rights movement to
realize its full promise, that elements in the African American communities,
and then only a small minority, began to break with the “American” idea, and it
is not coincidental that this involved an explicit break with Christianity,
something which could be made fully explicit only by opting for another, and
historically opposed religion –Islam.
Well before the end of the nineteenth century, in
other words, the American Dream as it had been understood by both its Puritan
and its Enlightenment advocates was dead. The United States would be neither a
Holy Commonwealth the Christian commitments of which would be reflected in a
just social order nor a petty bourgeois utopia of self-cultivation in which
yeoman farmers and master craftsmen studied the arts and sciences and
philosophy in the evening and sent their sons to public universities which
allowed the best the rise to the top while permitting everyone to develop as
far as they could. It was, rather, a developing industrial capitalist power
with a continental empire –and a voracious appetite for cheap labor.
Immigrants and
“America”
This said, the United States
still offered to the dispossessed of Europe –and many other parts of the world—
what seemed like unprecedented opportunities, and became a magnet for peasants
displaced by the penetration of capitalist relations of production into the
countryside, as well as for religious minorities –especially Jews—escaping
persecution.
These
immigrants brought with them civilizational ideals which were, in many cases,
fundamentally different or even in conflict with both the Puritan and
Enlightenment ideological ensembles. As I have shown in depth elsewhere
(Mansueto 1985, 2002a), it was the immigrant working class which formed the
principal basis for the development of a mass socialist movement in the United
States, and it did so not because it was a proletariat, but because it was the
carrier of organizational forms and socioreligious traditions which supported
such a development and which were not easily assimilated to the American ideal.
More specifically, it was the mutual benefit societies formed by the immigrants
on the basis of old village networks which were gradually transformed into the
cells of immigrant socialist organizations such as the old Federazione
Socialista Italiana. These organizations were ideologically diverse, but
for the most part reflected a combination of peasant popular religion and
Masonic and freethinking craft traditions. Thus, in the Italian socialist
periodical Parola del Popolo articles about the Gesù socialista ran
side by side with columns by writers using pseudonyms like “Lucifero.” Anticlericalism
was nearly universal; anything like a full blown atheistic nihilism was rare.
This was a socialism better understood using the categories of Durkheim,
Gramsci, or even the Russian Narodniki than those of Marx, Engels,
Kautsky, or Lenin.
These
immigrant communities did not, to be sure, see themselves as engaged in a
frontal assault on the American way of life; rather they understood America
precisely as defined by a pluralism which at once admitted to the public arena
even ideologies fundamentally at variance with the historic consensus (such as
socialism) and which not only permitted but actually encouraged the development
of distinct subcultures. Thus socialists of my grandfather’s generation saw no
conflict between their political commitments and their love for “America.” On
the contrary, it was precisely because the United States allowed him to
advocate socialism openly and struggle for it by peaceful and democratic means
that he loved it so deeply. Jewish territorialists (a tendency within the
Jewish socialist movement which supported the establishment of a Jewish
homeland, but did not believe that that homeland needed to be in Israel) even
imagined that the U.S. federalism might allow them to create a Jewish state
within the larger framework of the U.S. polity.
The
immigrant culture which developed in the great industrial cities of the US, in
other words, engaged the “America” actually created by the founders rather than
any of the Americas the founders had intended. Aspects of this “actually
existing America,” –i.e. its capitalist economic structure— they often struggled
vigorously against, but other aspects –the possibility of a polity defined by debate around fundamental
questions of meaning and value, and thus of a democracy far from thorough going
that envisioned by either liberals or socialists in Europe—they transformed
into a conscious ideal.
What
happened to this ideal? The answer is twofold. On the one hand, the principal
institutions which organized the immigrant communities –the Socialist and
Communist Parties on the one hand, and the Catholic Church on the
other—rejected their reading of American pluralism. The old Socialist Party was
dominated largely by Anglo, German, and the a lesser extent Irish workers drawn
from the skilled crafts and organized in trade unions, and these workers looked
down on what they saw as unskilled foreigners who had to be assimilated to “American”
culture before they could become real participants in the public arena. Many
Socialists –though by no means as many as in Europe— also supported
participation by the United States in the First World War. Not surprisingly,
therefore, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe gravitated to the newly
formed Communist Party. But this party did not understand their socialism any
better than the “American” social democrats. In 1922, only 10% of the party’s
members belonged to the English speaking section, and by 1925 this figure had
grown to only 14% (Glazer 1961: 40). The party was, furthermore, organized
around the semi-autonomous language federations. The leadership, however, did
not understand what it had achieved by conquering for itself the allegiance of
the immigrant working class. Indeed, in 1925 the party expressed its
recognition of the contributions of the immigrants by undertaking a campaign of
“Bolshevisization” designed to “raise the level of organization, political, and
ideological discipline.” At the center of this campaign was the liquidation of
the language federations, which were the carriers of the immigrant socialist
traditions, and the reorganization of the party around a system of factory
nuclei –in spite of the fact that some immigrant groups, the Italians in
particular, tended not to work in factories. English classes were to be
mandatory for all comrades who were not already fluent in the language, and
leadership cadre were to be drawn from among the “American” comrades (Glazer 1961:
47-52, 56)!!! “Strengthening ideological discipline” meant that the orthodox
atheistic position of the communist movement on the religious question was much
more in evidence, and religious propaganda of the sort promoted by the FSI was
out of the question.
This campaign
had disastrous results. Membership dropped from 14,037 to 7,215 in the space of
one month, between 25 September and 25 October 1925, as immigrant
workers resisting the new line left or were purged from the party. Worse still,
the party lost its precious roots in the popular communal institutions and the
popular religious traditions of the immigrant working class --roots it has
never been able to rebuild.
The
liquidation of the language federations had two critical results. First,
liquidation of the language federations deprived the immigrant communities of
the institutional apparatus they needed to conserve their own cultures while
engaging the broader pluralistic public arena. Second, the party essentially
sent a strong and clear message to the immigrant communities that the struggle
for socialism had nothing to do with them or their traditions. On the contrary,
it meant the destruction of their institutions and the devaluation of their
traditions. Not surprisingly, most immigrants abandoned socialism once and for
all, significantly undermining the ideological pluralism of the American public
arena (Mansueto 2002a).
The other
potential carrier of an alternative immigrant culture –the Catholic Church—made
essentially the same decision as the secular left, albeit after some hesitation
and internal debate.
The Catholic Church in the late niineteenth century was not of one mind
as to how to contend with the ethnic differences which divided the immigrant
church in North America. Many felt that the most important task for the Church
was simply to maintain, or in the case of the Italian communities to gain, the
institutional loyalty ‑‑and thus to "save the souls"‑‑
of the immigrants, and advocated the establishment of national parishes, often
drawing on religious orders based in the old country, to establish a religious
environment in which the immigrants would feel comfortable (Shanbuch 1981).
Increasingly, however, the "AAmericanizing" wing of the
hierarchy was gaining influence over the North American Church. These
Americanizers were profoundly impressed with the accomplishments of American
civilization, which they attributed in no small part to the vigor and
individualism of American culture, and they were sensitive to accusations that
Catholicism was "un‑American," which they believed had to be
answered effectively if the Church was to have a future in this country. And,
with the exception of the immigrant clergy themselves, even those ecclesiastics
not associated with the "Americanist" tendency had little commitment
to preserving the religious traditions of the immigrant communities themselves,
and tended to see the national parishes more as a temporary expedient for
gaining a foothold in the communities, than as a permanent institution. And the
Vatican, while more than a little suspicious of "Americanism," both
as a theological tendency and as a way of life, was profoundly suspicious of
the institutional pluralism and relative autonomy from diocesan control which
the national parish system tended to give the immigrants.
In 1915 matters finally came to a head. A new code of canon law was
promulgated which made the territorial parish the legal norm, from which
departures were possible only by exception (Shanbuch 1981: 163). Promulgation
of the code was accompanied in Chicago by the appointment of Mundelein as
archbishop. Mundelein had little taste for cultural pluralism, and declared an
immediate moratorium on creation of new national parishes (1981:182). Those
already existing, provided they were self‑supporting, would be
transformed into vital links in an aggressive program of Americanization
(1981:172‑3). Those which could not support themselves ‑‑
this included most of the Italian American parishes‑‑ would be
closed (1981:163).
Of critical importance to Mundeleiin's program of Americanization was the
parochial school system. Initially, many Italian‑American and other immigrant
clergy had hoped that the parochial schools, attached to national parishes,
would be the first line of defense for immigrant culture, assuring that the
children of the immigrants were taught in their parents' languages, and that
English was taught only as a second language. Such, however, was not to be the
case. James Jennings, Mundelein's school superintendent, wrote in 1916 that it
was his purpose to
thoroughly Americanize the Catholic school system in
Chicago. We propose to teach our children that there shall no longer be Irish‑American,
German‑American, or Polish‑American in our city but only real
Americans. In other words we intend to take the hyphen out of the parochial
school system in Chicago. (1981:187‑8).
All
subjects, with the exception of foreign languages ‑‑as the native
tongues of the immigrants were now called‑‑ were to be taught in
English. Italian children were rarely taught by Italian sisters, but rather by
Irish or French Americans. It was not unheard of for Italian children to be
segregated during mass, being made to sit in the back of the church with the
African‑Americans (Vecoli 1969:233).
It was,
however, not internal decisions but rather external pressures which did the
most to undercut the immigrant reading of American pluralism. And here the
ideological salience of the struggle against fascism played a central role.
Where at least many of the European workers who joined the resistance fought
against fascism under the banners of the Communist Party (and even those who
did not fought alongside Communists), workers from the United States fought
under the banners of “America.” Indeed, it would not be too much to say that
the war took the sons of Italian, Sicilian, Polish, Jewish, and Irish workers
and made “Americans” out of them. Certainly the women of the immigrant
communities felt the change. As one woman told me, “the boys were somehow different
when they came back. It is like we couldn’t talk to them any more. Like
they were no longer one of us. (Oral Testimony, Italians in Chicago Oral
History Project)”
It is
conceivable that had the returning soldiers been re-integrated into their old
communities, that something more of their ethnic identities might have
remained, but shortly after the war they began moving out of the cities in
large numbers, populating newly developed suburban communities, something which
utterly disrupted the social patterns which made it possible to create and
sustain distinct ethnic identities in the first place. Rather than spending the
evening sitting on the stoop chatting with neighbors or paying a visit to the
barber shop to discuss the affairs of the day, people camped out in front of
their television sets. Rather than getting their news from The Jewish Daily
Forward or Parola del Popolo, they got it from the newly formed
networks, something which represented an unprecedented concentration of the
media of social communications in the hands of Capital. And of course the most
important function of the media was not to interpret the world, but rather to
change it, by feeding to viewers images of a the good life which centered more
or less exclusively on consumption. The GI Bill gave those who had served in
the armed forces unprecedented access to higher education, albeit of a rather
diluted variety. As the postwar generation entered the professional middle
class their commitment to trade unionism declined, and even those who remained
pro-union were rarely active members.
When, in
the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy unleashed his campaign against Communism from public
life in the United States, he faced little real opposition. But more was at
issue here than simply purging a discourse around socialism from public life. McCarthy’s
campaign resonated deeply with earlier witch-hunts going all of the way back to
the Bavarian illuminati scandal and perhaps further, to the literal witch-hunts
of the Puritan era, and made allegiance to one or another version of the
Puritan variant of the American ideal the condition for participation in the
public arena.
From the Crisis
of the 1960s to The Crisis of Socialism and the Victory of Neoliberalism
Why the Sixties Didn’t Change Things
Many, both in the United States
and abroad, believe that the movements of the 1960s represented at least a
challenge to, if not a decisive break with the understanding of American
identity which had emerged over the course of nearly two centuries and
crystallized in a particularly monolithic form in the previous decade. Indeed,
even the old Communist Parties were rejected as part of the “establishment”!
The
reality, however, was far more complex. There were many “movements” during the
1960s, each with its own distinctive social basis and political valence. In the
United States, the most important of these was the Civil Rights movement, which
was first and foremost a movement within the established framework of
“American” political discourse (indeed within its most authoritative variant,
the old evangelical social reform variant of the Puritan ideological ensemble),
and a movement to gain for those who were still excluded, especially African
Americans, access to what other Americans already enjoyed. There was also a new
wave of the women’s movement which, while it certainly developed a more radical
wing, was for the most part also firmly embedded in the “American tradition.”
Indeed, this wave was first and foremost a response to the development of
effective artificial contraception which gave women increased control over
their bodies and opened up for them new possibilities which, however, required
some modest changes in law and custom if they were to be realized. What was
being demanded, however, was simply what every liberal society claims it
accords its citizens anyway –equal access to careers and public office on the
basis of talent.
The
youth and student movement was more complex and ambiguous in its social
character. At its base, this was a movement of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia
resisting proletarianization –resisting transformation, in the words of the
popular sociology of the day, into “organization men.” This gave the movement a
radical edge, and an ability to see some of the contradictions of modernity
which had been missed even by the communist left –the problems of bureaucratic
organization, for example and the danger of ecological devastation. And because
of the profound connection between capitalist modernity and the “American” way
of life, it also gave the young rebels an impetus to question the role of the
United States in the world and to develop a sense of solidarity with struggles
in other parts of the world. This push was intensified by the fact that the
youth/student movement was also, first and foremost, a movement against the war
in Vietnam. And yet even this did not lead to a global, generational break with
American identity. On the contrary, there was a longstanding tradition of
anti-imperialism within the liberal
Protestant and evangelical social reform traditions, going back to Whig
resistance of the conquest of Mexico, and most of the resistance to the Vietnam
war, and later adventures in Central America remained within this framework.
Most of those who went beyond anti-imperialism to genuine solidarity with
movements of national liberation did so on the basis of a shared Catholic
religious identity with those prosecuting those movements, an identity which
was undercut when the Vatican began its campaign against the theology of
liberation in the 1980s. And the small minority which actually identified with
the communist leadership of these national liberation movements soon found, that
the foreign parties they supported had no more patience with their existential
angst than did the market system they had rejected.
More
importantly, however, the youth/student movement reflected the underlying
weakness of its social base. It is not that, as classical historical
materialism has argued, the petty bourgeoisie is incapable of developing a
powerful movement for social justice –that is what the guilds were all about,
and earliest socialism was first and foremost a movement of petty bourgeoisie resistance
to capitalist development. It is that this petty bourgeoisie was weak.
Partly this is because it was not really much of a petty bourgeoisie at all.
While elements in the movement were drawn from old petty bourgeois families
which were, ironically, experiencing both increased prosperity and proletarianization,
as members of the liberal professions were gradually turned into “organization
men,” most were the grandchildren of immigrant workers and the children of
physicians, attorneys, or more often of engineers, accountants, schoolteachers,
nurses, or social workers, who had attended the university on the GI Bill. They
believed that expanded access to higher education was an invitation to join the
ranks of the autonomous liberal professions, and when they found out that
instead it was a mechanism for training a new intellectual proletariat, they
balked. They lacked, however, a petty bourgeois tradition which might actually
have sustained real resistance. As we have seen, the postwar generation grew up
in a suburban environment which had all but destroyed the rich network of
institutions and traditions which had nurtured immigrant socialism. Rejecting
the “American” way of life meant rejecting the traditions of the old “American”
petty bourgeoisie –i.e. the traditions of liberal Protestant, evangelical or
Enlightenment social reform. And so their resistance more often than not took
the form of pure self-indulgence: sex, drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll. And when they
realized that their pleasures cost money, and that the apparent prosperity of
their youths notwithstanding their parents were very far from being able to
endow them for life, they cried “uncle” and were reborn as the “yuppies” of the
1980s and 1990s –organization men (and now organization women as well) even
more pliable than their parents because they were even more addicted to
prosperity.
The Present Period
The present period, in the United
States as elsewhere, continues to be defined first and foremost by the collapse
of the Soviet bloc. This has, variously, been interpreted as a global victory for
capitalism, democracy, and secularism, an end of history in which ideological
struggle will all but disappear, and the beginning of a clash of civilizations
in which the socialist opposition to Capital has been replaced by a militant
Islamic opposition and the conflict between competing modernist ideologies such
as liberalism and socialism has given way to a conflict between civilizations
constituted by fundamentally different principles and values.
We have
argued elsewhere (Mansueto 2005) that both of these theories are fundamentally
inadequate and that what we are witnessing is, instead, the beginning of a
civilizational crisis in which the modern ideal –transcending finitude by means
of scientific and technological progress— has lost its credibility, but in
which a competing civilizational ideal has yet to emerge. Current political
struggles –both globally and in the US-- are dominated by a conflict between
those for whom globalization at the very least opens up fundamentally new
possibilities, and those who feel themselves “left behind.” The former have
either tried to revise and revitalize modernist ideologies such as liberalism
or occasionally socialism or else have embraced the reality of postmodernity
--a civilization without an ideal-- and mmade it into an ideology. The latter
have gravitated towards various forms of fundamentalism which, we have argued
are not so much antimodern as early modern –a return to the vision of humanity
as God’s vice-regent rather than as an autonomous itself the emerging cosmic
sovereign of the high modernist utopia. Central to such fundamentalisms is a
search for validation on some basis other than merit –especially intellectual
merit. At its margins (and especially in its Christian form) this trend becomes
openly anticivilizational, looking forward to apocalypse as the only way in which
those left behind by high modernity can be rescued from their irrelevance.
The
current political situation in the United States reflects a very specific
crystallization of this dynamic. Partly just because of its size and diversity,
but partly because if the historic weakness of socialism here, the United
States has larger proportion of relatively backward economic sectors (i.e.
sectors which can compete only with subsidy or by reducing wages to world
market levels) than any other advanced industrialized country. The current
ruling bloc, organized in the Republican Party, is essentially a cross-class
alliance between these various elements. Fundamentalist Christianity and
various forms of social conservatism serve as mechanisms for linking those
sections of the working class and middle strata which have been left behind,
especially by globalization, to the political project of more pragmatic
backward sectors of Capital, such as the petroleum industry as well as sectors
which may be relatively high technology, but which have reason to resist
rationalization –the healthcare and insurance sectors, for example. Popular
support for imperialist adventurism –e.g. spreading “democracy” throughout the
Middle East—is rooted fundamentally in a sense that the “American way of life,”
at least as understood by those left behind, is profoundly threatened.
The
opposition, on the other hand, brings together essentially all of the forward
looking sectors of the population –most of the higher technology sectors of
capital, those elements in the middle strata and working classes which bring
the skills necessary to profit from globalization, elements in the petty
bourgeoisie which have moved into new economic niches created by globalization,
and those elements in the working class (mostly immigrants) for whom even
movement into lower technology, lower wage activities in the US represents a
step forward. It also includes the African American population, which remains
wedded to a progressive vision of the future, largely because of its continued
embrace of the evangelical social reform tradition.
Even in
the US these latter elements probably represent a majority of the population, and
are certainly in a better long-term economic position, but their immediate political
weight is undermined partly by the fact that they are younger, noncitizen, and lacking
traditions of active political participation. This strategic disadvantage is
compounded by the effectiveness of the Republican mobilization of the
fundamentalist variant of the Puritan version of the American ideal. Any
attempt to redefine the “America” in a way which stresses its pluralism is, in
other words, labeled unpatriotic. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has shown
that it does not understand the possibilities of American pluralism very
profoundly. The Democratic Party is the heir of the Enlightenment variant of
the American ideal (and of that variant’s suspect taint). While it has incorporated
the discourse of those liberal Protestants and evangelicals (mostly African
American) frustrated by American’s failure to live up to their ideals, it has
always regarded the immigrant population more as a political base to be engaged
with promises of economic opportunity than as real partners in defining
America.
At a
deeper level, however, the possibilities of American pluralism are still
constrained by the changes in social patterns which took place during the post
WWII period. Mediating institutions which link people from different
ethnoreligious communities have declined as the United States has become
suburbanized and privatized. People have probably always given priority to
those mediating institutions which organized their core identities –local
parishes and congregations, for example. Secondary institutions which bring
together people with mixed identities have suffered most. The decline of these
organizations has, furthermore, been asymmetric, with more surviving in
socially conservative “red state” regions than in major metropoles and high
tech suburban corridors.
These
problems not withstanding, the road forward for the United States lies clearly
in building on its pluralism. The United States is far behind Europe and China
in addressing some of the critical challenges of the coming period –energy
shortages, global warming, the need for a highly skilled, innovative workforce.
Where we stand out is in our superior adaptation to pluralism. Even as the US
Congress debates immigration legislation which looks like it will be
unvisionary at best and draconian at worst, the immigrant rights movement has
become a potent and growing force, and it has neither veered towards random
violence nor elicited the kind of backlash engendered by its European
counterparts.
This
pluralism constitutes a powerful comparative advantage in a period of civilizational
crisis. The peculiar polity devised by the American founders for rather
unexemplary political reasons has created the institutional context for, and
fostered the first steps towards the practice of, of a new kind of democracy
which is a debate not just about means but also about ends, a public arena
which is pluralism but which takes principles and values seriously, a public
arena constituted by debate around
fundamental questions of meaning and value.
This
cannot, of course, by itself resolve the other challenges which the United
States will face in the coming period, but it will create a context in which
Christian triumphalism and other ideologies of the left behind can be forced to
justify themselves in a broader public arena –something which will prove
difficult and begin to erode their public weight. It will also create a context
in which progressive spiritualities of meaning and self-cultivation can
flourish, creating a political culture in which it will be easier to promote
public investment in the development of human capacities.
The
result will not be the Holy Commonwealth or Enlightenment utopia, the “last,
best hope for humanity” which the founders envisioned, but it may be something
far better: a society which realizes that precisely because humanity is so
varied and creative, there is no last best hope, but only an ongoing search for
meaning and an ongoing struggle for excellence. If the United States can
bequeath this to humanity, it will have more than justified its existence.
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[1] We use
the term “
[2] This was
certainly true for Marx, for example, whose German Ideology was first
and foremost an attempt to come to terms with the fact that
[3]
Consider, for example, the Weberian claim that Asian religions such as
Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism are incapable of sustaining action aimed at
innerworldly transformation (Weber 1921/1968). Committed Weberians have every
bit as much difficulty understanding Japanese industrialization or Burmese
Buddhist socialism as committed Marxists do the
[4] This is the Catholicism of Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri. See Alighieri 1300/1969a, b; Aquinas 1272/1952.
[5] Thus,
for example, the Norman conquest which created modern
[6] Note that widespread access to university studies was to be the result, not the cause of economic opportunity as in later versions of the Democratic Party ideal.
[7] Another wing of the party was dominated by evangelicals such as Nathaniel Niles, who derived from their Calvinism a radically democratic ideology which stressed the struggle for social justice and which sought to hold the rich accountable for the sins of the new nation. This wing of the party was led by Aaron Burr who was bound to it by blood, being a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, and was discredited after he was marginalized from political life (Heimart 1966).
[8] One need
only read Federalist 10, in which
[9] It is true, to be sure, that establishment at the level of the individual states was still not excluded. But as we will see, the individual states soon became to pluralistic themselves for establishment to be a realistic option.
[10] For an analysis of this peculiar species see Milbank 1991.
[11] Prior to the Industrial Revolution it was not unusual for the employer himself to roll out a keg of rum around mid afternoon to carry his workers through the final hours of their work day. Industrialization, which involved the use of fast-moving, dangerous equipment made this impossible.
[12] There
were, to be sure, exceptions to this pattern.