The frustration and bitterness that fills American politics these days reflects the failure of our current social, political and economic institutions and practices to deliver the results that Americans want and expect. It’s comparable to the frustration and fear that swept through the country in the late 19th and early 20th century as the first American dream – that every family could prosper on its own farm – gradually died.

From the era of the first European settlements in North America up through World War I, the family farm was the key social, economic and even political institution in the country.  Until the 1920 census, a majority of Americans lived in rural areas and, unlike the oppressed peasants of Europe most owned and worked their own land.

The individual family farm was, in mythology and often enough in reality, prosperous and independent.  For Thomas Jefferson and a long line of ideological descendants, the family farm was the cornerstone of American democracy.  For generations, government policy sought to ease the path to cheap and — after the Homestead Act — free western land for American families.

The limits of this approach did not begin to appear until after the Civil War. As the best land was taken, the remaining land available for homesteading was increasingly marginal.  It was too cold, too dry or too remote.  The dependence of farmers on politically powerful railroad companies to ship their crops to market and the power of banks and speculators in the commodity markets put family farms at a disadvantage. The global commodity glut that developed as new techniques opened up new land not only in the American west, but also in Russia, Canada, Argentina and Australia depressed the prices farmers could get.

The last great burst of traditional American farm policy came with the Oklahoma land rush of 1889.  The federal government opened former tribal lands for homesteading, and thousands of families rushed to stake their claims on new land. Many of these families would be among the dispossessed “Okies” who fled the Dust Bowl a generation later.

The family farm and the social and political model that rested on it didn’t die easy and it didn’t die quick.  (Even today huge agribusinesses shelter their vast subsidy payments behind the public affection for the family farm.) Waves of populist protest against the decline of the original American social model roiled politics for decades. William Jennings Bryan built his political career on the economic and political frustration of millions of small farmers caught up in an inexorable and, to many, incomprehensible set of economic changes.

I’ve written in earlier posts about the shift from the first American Dream to the second: from the family farm to the suburban “homestead.” It was a profound change in American life and culture that has not yet been fully explored.  The family farm integrated production and consumption, work and leisure, family and business.  The family wasn’t just a union of sentiment: it was an element of production.  Mom and Dad worked as a team to feed, house and clothe the family, and as the kids grew up they took on greater and greater responsibilities in the common effort.  Their lives at home prepared them for the new lives they would lead on their own: the kids would grow up, marry, and start farms.

The 20th century suburban homestead was a very different place.  In the early, “pure” form, Mom and Dad were still a team, but their roles were more differentiated than on the farm.  Dad worked in the office or the factory and brought home the money; Mom organized the home and raised the kids.  The kids might do chores around the house (girls more than boys), but their lives were increasingly outside of the family circle.  They went to school full time from the age of six on, and instead of learning basic work and social skills in the family with their parents, they were taught skills and patterns of living in school to prepare them, in turn, for lives in which working life and home life were divided.

After the 1960s, Mom started working in a factory, an office or a store, and for girls as well as boys the center of gravity of their educational and social life moved away from the family circle.

Both the family farm and the “crabgrass frontier” (as Kenneth Jackson calls 20th century suburban America in a remarkable book) had their advantages and their drawbacks, and both allowed for broad prosperity and reasonable dignity and economic security for tens of millions of Americans. Generation after generation embraced both social ideals while millions of people from all over the world came to the United States, hoping to share in the American Dream.

Today the 20th century model of the American dream faces the same kind of crisis the 19th century version experienced 100 years ago.  International competition and technological advances mean that the American factory worker’s earnings and opportunities are depressed in the way farmers were going to the wall 100 years ago.  In the last twenty years, well-intentioned government efforts to put more people in owner-occupied housing led to a housing bubble and mass bankruptcies in the face of a financial panic and the ensuing recession, the worst in eighty years.

Our political battles today reflect the same kinds of frustrations we saw in the old populist era.  Many cannot fathom another and “higher” form of the American Dream beyond the old crabgrass utopia. They want to turn back the clock and restore the old system because they don’t know of anything else that will work.  The explicit political demand for this kind of restoration is usually found on the left, where it is often coupled with demands for the protection of American industries from foreign competition.  But nostalgia for the old days isn’t just a left wing emotion; a free floating anger stemming from the breakdown of a broadly accepted social model helps power political currents on both ends of the spectrum.

In the 1890s, the “restorationists” were the agrarian populists.  They wanted to protect family farmers from the forces that were undermining this hallowed way of life and they genuinely could not imagine that the end result of the shift out of agriculture could lead to richer and better lives for most Americans.  This was perfectly understandable and rational: few people in 1890 could have predicted or imagined the new social system that would emerge on the basis of mass production and mass consumption in the 20th century.

But understandable and rational is not the same thing as right; the agrarian populists were defeated as much by their inability to develop workable policies as by the arguments of their opponents. The farmers were angry at the railroads and the banks, but although these big corporations often did abuse and even cheat small interests, and although they certainly used their economic strength to get state legislators to write favorable legislation — the railroads and banks weren’t the farmers’ most formidable and destructive enemies.  Their most dangerous and implacable enemies were the laws of economics and the larger historical forces driving agriculture worldwide toward a new, large-scale, capital intensive model with which the small family farm could no longer compete.

It is, of course, a very similar situation today. The forces ripping up our old social model are too powerful to beat.  That is not because the rich bankers or global multinationals are engaged in a conscious conspiracy of rip-offs and oppression (though, frankly speaking, big business does sometimes engage in exactly that). It is because the forces ripping up the social model are deeply implanted in the nature of the economic system — and that system is a reflection of the propensities in human nature which we cannot and perhaps should not overcome.

There is another important similarity, one often overlooked in the pessimism, anger and anxiety provoked by the inexorable decline of the “blue social model” that shaped America in the 20th century — just as it was overlooked 100 years ago.

The similarity is this: the changes in the world economy may be destructive in terms of the old social model, but they are profoundly liberating and benign in and of themselves.  The family farm wasn’t dying because capitalism had failed or a Malthusian crisis was driving the world to starvation.  The family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended. The industrial and scientific revolutions of the 19th century made agriculture so much more productive, and brought so many of the world’s hitherto remote and inaccessible lands into productive contact with world centers of population, that old and outmoded methods of production could no longer be sustained.

The family farm didn’t die of thirst in a desert; it drowned in a sea of abundance. 125 years ago, Americans didn’t have to organize themselves to cope with poverty and the erosion of living standards; they had to organize themselves to capture and enjoy the vastly increased prosperity and freedom which new technology made possible.

This is exactly what is happening today. Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim.  It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.

As we figure this out, and reorganize ourselves to exploit the unprecedented opportunities before us, America is most likely headed for another era of rapidly rising standards of living.

In the past, the United States prospered partly because of our (still uniquely favorable) geography and natural resource base, and partly because our culture and our institutions made us a dynamic and innovative people who somehow got to the future before anybody else. All of those advantages are still ours today; just as the United States was the first country to achieve mass prosperity based on “Fordist” mass production and consumption, we are well placed to be the first country to enjoy the full prosperity that the new technological revolutions make possible.

The challenge for America today is similar to the challenge we faced more than a century ago, even though our responses will have to be different.  Progressive society was reasonably well adapted to the conditions of its time and was able to transform a nation of family farmers into a nation of suburban homesteaders; post-progressive society will have to achieve a similar transformation in our time.

Doing this won’t be easy.  It’s going to take the political and cultural creativity of more than one generation to reformulate and rebuild the next version of the American Dream, but it can, will and must be done.  Nobody can predict where all this creativity and energy will take us, but it’s already possible to see some of the major lines along which we can advance — and to identify some of the roadblocks holding us back that will have to be cleared out of the way.

In future posts I will do my best to scout out the road ahead.  At this point, let’s just conclude by remembering the words that Arthur Hugh Clough wrote and that Winston Churchill quoted in the darkest days of World War Two, “But westward, look, the land is bright.”

Success in the past does not guarantee success in the future. But one thing does seem clear from the historical evidence: the American system, for all its often stultifying qualities, has also shown a greater capacity to adapt and recover from difficulties than many other nations, including its geopolitical competitors. This undoubtedly has something to do with the relative freedom of American society, which rewards innovators, often outside the existing power structure, for producing new ways of doing things; and with the relatively open political system of America, which allows movements to gain steam and to influence the behavior of the political establishment. The American system is slow and clunky in part because the Founders designed it that way, with a federal structure, checks and balances, and a written Constitution and Bill of Rights—but the system also possesses a remarkable ability to undertake changes just when the steam kettle looks about to blow its lid.

But the essay is significant not only for its arguments against those prophesying the end of American primacy, but for its biggest fan: President Barack Obama. Reports Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy:

In an off-the-record meeting with leading news anchors, including ABC‘s George Stephanopoulos and NBC‘s Brian Williams, Obama drove home that argument [against American decline made in his State of the Union] using an article written in The New Republic by Kagan entitled “The Myth of American Decline.”

Obama liked Kagan’s article so much that he spent more than 10 minutes talking about it in the meeting, going over its arguments paragraph by paragraph, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed to The Cable.

Famously, candidate Obama hit the campaign trail with a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World in hand. More experienced and familiar with the way the world works, the President now seems to have shifted his ground.

The New York Times calls Robert Kagan a neoconservative and a Romney advisor and savors what it calls the “delicious irony” that his work can be taken as endorsing the idea that US power has waxed under President Obama.  It also notes that President Obama’s State of the Union speech was in some passages “Reaganesque,” sounding notes of optimism and hope.

Here at Via Meadia we’ve been noting for some time that as President, Barack Obama has spent a lot of time getting in touch with his inner George Bush.  Pretty much every thing he said about foreign policy prior to January 2009 has gone under the bus. Disregarding the advice of liberal Democrats like Vice President Biden, he’s killed Osama bin Laden, escalated the war in Afghanistan, kept Guantanamo open for business, and pretty much bombed everything and everyone he could. He’s adopted an Asian strategy based on increasing US influence rather than giving ground to China’s ‘inexorable’ rise. He’s toughened policy on Iran. He’s given up on a global warming treaty and on the idea that Europe can help reshape the world. He’s embraced the idea of overthrowing selected Arab governments by force in order to build a more democratic and, hopefully, ultimately, more stable Middle East. Give him a little more time in office and he might come to understand how the US-Israel relationship works, why it’s a bad idea to announce a surge and a retreat at the same time, why an extended US presence in Iraq would have served our interests better than a premature exit, why the Security Council can’t be given a veto over the American decision for peace or war, and even why young people who choose military service should be honored and well paid.

The irony that the Times is doing its best not to notice is that the Bush administration’s most bitter critic on the campaign trail became to a very large degree its loyal successor in office.

If you asked Theodore Roosevelt what kind of Republican he was, he would — and did — tell you that he was a proud standard bearer of the Hamiltonian tradition in American politics.

Ron Paul, who would have fought TR tooth and nail as much as he is currently fighting both President Obama and ex-Speaker Newt would agree.  Gingrich, Obama and TR are all Hamiltonians, and Ron Paul thinks they are all dead wrong.

As we gear up for 2012 and beyond, American attention is increasingly returning to the oldest battle in our political history: the battle between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians that split George Washington’s cabinet down the middle and established our first party system.

That fight was essentially over three things that divide us intensely today: the role of the federal government, the nature of the credit system, and the future of the social hierarchy.  Alexander Hamilton favored a strong federal government at home and abroad, a centralized credit system similar to the British one with a Bank of the United States acting as our central bank, and believed that the best educated and most widely experienced people in the United States constituted a natural aristocracy and should play the leading role in our politics.

Thomas Jefferson disagreed with virtually everything Hamilton believed.  He wanted a weak federal government, detested Hamilton’s banking system, and feared that the alliance of a social elite with a powerful government and a strong central bank would turn the US into a European-style aristocratic or monarchical society.

Bipartisan Establishment, meet Mr. Tea Party.

The disagreement between these two men continued to reverberate down the years.  John Quincy Adams, Nicholas Biddle, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln sided with Hamilton up through the Civil War.  Presidents Madison and Monroe followed Jefferson, more or less; so in his own irascible way did Andrew Jackson.  The Southern Confederacy tried to write Hamilton out of the constitution when it modified the Philadelphia document to serve the rebel government.

Hamiltonian Hegemony

Alexander Hamilton owned the 20th century.  America’s growing global role made his vision of a strong military look like simple common sense; as US corporations became more globally focused and responsibility for the international financial order shifted from Britain to the US, his support for a strong federal role in promoting US economic interests around the world grew much less controversial.

While the 20th century was in some ways a very democratic one, with both women and racial minorities gaining the vote, it was also an unusually hierarchical period by American standards.  The 20th century was more elitist than the 19th; while access to the educational and social elite was open to talented outsiders, more and more power flowed to “experts”.

This was partly because the United States shifted from being a nation of small farmers, beholden to no one, to a nation of employees living in cities and suburbs.  The administration and management of a large urban unit requires a larger and more powerful government than does a region of small farmers and rural communities.  The rise of an interconnected national economy made the federal government’s power to control interstate commerce relatively more important; in the age of the automobile and even more in the information economy, more and more commerce is interstate, less and less purely local.

The rise of large fortunes also helped.  The Ford Foundation and other large philanthropic organizations employed, empowered and deployed experts to solve social problems.  The experts followed the doctrines of the new social sciences, believed at the time to be a source of objective wisdom.

This brief list only scratches the surface of the forces that made 20th century America what it was, but put these and other trends together, and the 2oth century saw the steady eclipse of the agrarian and Jeffersonian American vision by the urban, commercial and hierarchical Hamiltonian ideal.

The Kennedy-Johnson administrations saw the peak of this Hamiltonian era.  The son of a plutocrat summoned the “best and the brightest” from Harvard to carry out an ambitious program of national and international change.  From the Alliance for Progress abroad to the War on Poverty at home to the Apollo space program aimed at reaching the moon, the Democratic administrations between 1961 and 1969 brought all the elements of 2oth century Hamiltonian America onto the stage.

Keynesian economics was a cornerstone of the new Hamiltonian vision.  Keynes is Hamilton on steroids.  Hamilton (like the British visionaries who built the Bank of England on which he modeled his Bank of the United States) believed that a well-managed federal debt was a national blessing, not a national curse.  Keynes made the same argument about deficits that Anglo-American thinkers had long made about government debt: an appropriate and well-managed government deficit could be an engine of economic growth.  And if Hamilton believed that the central bank could manage debt effectively in a world of specie-backed currency, Keynes argued that central banks and even a global central bank could manage debt and deficits in a world of paper or fiat money.

The Hamiltonian vision was further reinforced by Theodore Roosevelt’s vision of government as the protector of the little man against the unchecked power of large corporations.  Jeffersonians had classically worried that the federal government was the leviathan that, unchecked, could destroy American freedom.  Rooseveltian progressive Hamiltonians saw the federal government as the park ranger, protecting the tourists and ordinary citizens from the corporate velociraptors in the Jurassic Park of modern American life.  The stronger the ranger, the safer the people.

Big Tent Hamiltonianism

The blue social model, the progressive American system of the 20th century, was the love child of Hamiltonian liberal theory and social democratic aspirations rooted in the Industrial Revolution and the class struggle it spawned.  It used a capitalist state, and capital markets, to advance both classic Hamiltonian objectives and the social goals of the urban working class.  For a good chunk of the twentieth century, the American party system reflected this division: Rockefeller Republicans stressed the liberal and Hamiltonian roots of the system, liberal Democrats stressed the social democratic aspects of its agenda.

In addition to the large social and cultural forces that made 20th century America so hospitable to the Hamiltonian vision, there was a very specific political switch.  During the New Deal, the South rediscovered the virtues of an economically active national government.  George Washington (who decisively favored Alexander Hamilton in his arguments with Thomas Jefferson), John Marshall, Henry Clay and even the young, nationalist John Calhoun had all seen the virtues of a national government acting to promote state development.  But as the Hamiltonian cause in the early republic became linked to a high tariff, pro-manufacturing stance, and as southern slaveholders came to favor constitutional theories that limited the power of the federal government to interfere in the South’s “peculiar institution”, the South threw itself squarely into the Jeffersonian camp.

After the Civil War, the control of the federal government by Hamiltonian, high-tariff business interests, tribal loyalty to the Democratic Party, and the war-hallowed cause of states’ rights, plus fear that a strong federal government would meddle in southern racial policies reinforced Dixie’s attachment to Jeffersonian views.

That began to change in the New Deal.  Lyndon Johnson typified the new kind of southern politician who understood that federal spending on infrastructure, electricity generation, and agricultural subsidies could transform the South.  Right up through the War on Poverty — which developed formulae for federal funding that gave the greatest federal support to the poorest states (almost all southern) — a strong federal government, once the bane and the nightmare of the South, became its strongest ally in Dixie’s attempt to close the development gap with the North.

America’s rise to world power further improved the position of Hamiltonians at home.  The transfer of financial power from London to New York and the liberation of the financial system from the gold standard allowed American Hamiltonians to reconcile their own preference for sound, internationally convertible money and the interests of capital-hungry entrepreneurs and farmers.  Under American leadership the global monetary system became far more expansionary than in the British era, and the sharp contrast between Hamiltonian banking interests supporting tight money against populists clamoring for debt relief was blurred in post World War Two America.

As the US shifted from a trade policy based on being a free rider in the global British trading system to being the organizing power in the postwar system of free trade, Hamiltonianism also shed its support of protective tariffs and embraced the cause of free trade.  Hamiltonian tariff and tight money policy had set farmers’ teeth on edge from the earliest days of the Republic; 20th century Hamiltonians shed this political baggage and, with government crop subsidies, the regulation of railroad rates, and infrastructure projects (irrigation, highways) supporting agricultural interests, the increasingly corporatized agricultural interest in the United States moved from the Jeffersonian to the Hamiltonian camp where it remains today.

Wrestling With Founders

The long Hamiltonian ascendancy in the United States has brought many benefits.  It is in my judgment neither possible nor desirable to go back to the weak farmer’s republic that Thomas Jefferson thought he was building in the 1790s.  At home and abroad a healthy Hamiltonianism is an essential building block of American prosperity and security.

But there is also no doubt that the Hamiltonian-social democratic synthesis of the twentieth century is not adequate for the times in which we live.  Corporatism has bred the kind of cronyism and corruption Jeffersonians have always feared.  The alliance of the wealthy and the elite with strong state power is creating class divisions and class conflict.  The remoteness of the federal government from popular control (to be one of 300 million citizens is to have no effective control over the governing power) threatens to hollow out Americans’ sense of self reliance and independence while keeping most people at a great remove from any real exercise of political power.

Some of the problems we face are due to essential defects in Hamiltonianism, against which a Jeffersonian revival is our only safety.  The unchecked Hamiltonian ascendancy of the twentieth century has led to a lopsided America.  A revival of the Jeffersonian element in American political thought and practice is essential to our national health.

Other problems are due to the need for Hamiltonianism to reform itself: to develop new economic and social approaches for a new era.  Hamiltonianism at its best is forward-looking and revolutionary.  It is not the tool of established interests but a force for innovation.

Either way, a long revival of American traditions of individualism, skepticism of elites, and distrust of the federal government is a rising force in this country.  Add to that suspicions of finance and of the influence of firms like Goldman Sachs in politics, and a full blown Jeffersonian reaction is beginning to emerge.

The decline of the blue social model, part Hamiltonian, part social democratic, is the reality that shapes the debate.  Jeffersonians like Ron Paul argue that the decline of the blue model exposes the essential fallacies of Hamiltonian governance and that the US needs to rebase itself on a Jeffersonian foundation.  Hostility to the Federal Reserve echoes Jefferson’s hostility to Hamilton’s First Bank of the United States; the desire to limit federal authority and revive states’ rights similarly echoes some of the country’s oldest political arguments.

In Osawatomie and beyond, President Obama will run for re-election as a Hamiltonian and a custodian of the 20th century progressive state.  He will argue that modest and careful reforms, trimming a few excesses here, making some innovative policy shifts there, can keep the old ship afloat in the twenty first century.  Like JFK, he will argue that the best and brightest can develop government policy that will guide the nation to a brighter future through collective action and state investments.

Governor Romney, so far as one can discern, is at his core a Hamiltonian as well, but he has less sympathy than President Obama and the Democrats for the blue synthesis of Hamiltonianism and social democracy.  He stands roughly in a line of Republican presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and George H. W. Bush who accepted the basic elements of the progressive state.  Former Speaker Gingrich is also a Hamiltonian, but much more than either Romney or Obama he believes that Hamiltonianism needs to be re-imagined for our times.  Congressman Paul is the one Jeffersonian in the race, and of the four he seems the least likely to be elected in 2012.

What America needs is a debate between 21st century Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians.  Obama and Paul in their way are both looking backward; Gingrich feels the need for a deep reworking of the Hamiltonian tradition and his surprising surge in the polls suggests that he has touched a nerve in the public — despite the baggage of his past and the sometimes sketchy nature of his proposals.  Paul’s popularity also points to the growing public discontent with political approaches centered on the defense of the status quo.

On the whole, 2012 is not shaping up as the kind of epochal contest the country saw in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt used his Osawotomie speech to launch the Bull Moose Party.  The three way contest between Taft, Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt was the first election in which the dominant ideas of the 20th century were on display; we seem to be headed for something more modest this time.

The country needs a livelier and richer debate; over the next few days and weeks at Via Meadia we will do our part by trying to work through some of the ways in which Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian thought offer avenues for renewal and reform here in the twilight of Big Blue.

]]> http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/12/06/the-age-of-hamilton/feed/ 51 http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/10/10/happy-columbus-day-observed/ http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/10/10/happy-columbus-day-observed/#comments Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:12:58 +0000 Walter Russell Mead http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/?p=15275 Continue reading →]]>

Columbus at Salvador, Dioscuro Tolin (Wikimedia)

The usual grumblings attend the day on which we commemorate the most famous illegal immigrant in the history of the Americas, an undocumented wanderer from Spain who brought plagues, fire and the sword from the Old World to the New.

Columbus Day is our most confused holiday celebration, one in which the public understanding of the day has shifted the farthest from the intent of those who instituted the observance. Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World on October 12, 1492 only became a federal holiday in the US in 1934. Since the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1971 we have celebrated it on the Monday closest to the actual date; Veterans’ Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and the Fourth of July escaped the leveling axe and are still celebrated on their actual dates.

There is a long history of celebrating the European discovery of the Americas outside the United States.  Many South American and Caribbean countries began celebrating the day as a celebration of Latino ethnic identity well before Columbus Day made it onto the holiday calendar in the US; Venezuela now celebrates it as the Day of Indigenous Resistance.  In Spain, the day on which an Italian discovered what we now know as the Bahamas – under the impression he was nearing Japan – was long celebrated as Dia de la Hispanidad.

In American history, the fight to make a holiday on Columbus Day actually had almost nothing to do with the actual arrival of Christopher Columbus in the western hemisphere.  It wasn’t about celebrating the European conquest of the Americas or the extirpation of the native tribes.

The day was made a holiday after years of lobbying as a way of recognizing the contribution of Roman Catholics and immigrants generally to American life.  It is a holiday to celebrate diversity, not to commemorate the imperial outreach of Ferdinand and Isabella, a deeply regrettable couple who were notorious oath breakers, inquisitors and anti-Semites.

Back in the 1930s there was a widespread feeling among both Protestant and Catholic Americans that Roman Catholics, and especially Catholics from non-English speaking countries, were not and could not be “real Americans”.  Al Smith, the popular governor of New York, was the first Roman Catholic ever nominated for the presidency by a major party; suspicion of his religion made his defeat even greater than usual, as many solidly Democratic and pro-Prohibition voters in the South deserted the Catholic “wet” to vote for the reliably dry Protestant, Herbert Hoover.

For the KKK in those days, Catholics were one of the foreign influences that “real” Americans had to fight, and many Protestant whites still considered Italians, Greeks and other southern European ethnic groups to be too “swarthy” to be fully white.

Irish Catholics had faced discrimination, but with most of them arriving in the US as native speakers of English (some still spoke Gaelic as a first language in the 19th century) and looking as “white” as anybody else, the Irish, through hard work and the sheer weight of numbers, had carved out a pretty solid place for themselves by the 1930s.  The Irish arrival at the height of American society was signaled by FDR’s appointment of Joseph Kennedy as his ambassador to the Court of St. James; many a Hibernian soul was comforted and soothed to think of an Irishman like Kennedy hobnobbing with kings and prime ministers on more than equal terms as the representative of the President of the United States.

The Italian-Americans were the largest and most powerful Catholic ethnic group that still felt themselves to be uneasily outside the American mainstream.  They were (and are) swing voters; especially in FDR’s home state of New York Italian-Americans (partly out of old rivalries with the Irish) are often Republicans.

The Knights of Columbus was founded in 1882 in New Haven, Connecticut as a Catholic fraternal organization.  Catholics were forbidden by Rome to join the Freemasons, and other fraternal groups at that time in the US barred Catholics from membership.  These civic self help fraternal groups provided community services, raised money for members in distress, and often organized cheap life insurance for their members.  The isolation of Catholics from this vital element of American life both emphasized their outsider status in the US and left them without the resources and support these groups often provided.

The Knights of Columbus filled a need and quickly became a national organization.  Membership in the organization was a way for Catholics to help themselves and their community, to assert their identity as Catholics, and also to move into the culture of civic activism and voluntary associations that is a hallmark of traditional Anglo-Protestant social organization in both the UK and the US.

Christopher Columbus had a useful name for the organization’s founders to appropriate.  He was a Catholic himself, and an agent of their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella.  Known to every schoolchild as the discoverer of America, he emphasized the indispensable role that Catholics had played in the story of the New World from the time of the discovery forward.  The Irish at that time dominated American Catholic life, but there were tensions between the Irish and more recent immigrant groups struggling for representation and recognition. Choosing the name of an Italian hired by the Spanish gave the Knights of Columbus a universal and small “c” catholic character, rather than a purely Hibernian one.

The order was controversial; in 1912 claims that the fourth degree knights had to swear an oath to exterminate Freemasons and Protestants became widespread, and the charges figured in the 1928 campaign against Al Smith.  When the Episcopalian Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, the lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and Italian-American organizations and lobbies to make Columbus Day a national holiday grew intense, and FDR signed a bill to make October 12 a holiday in 1934.

Columbus Day is not an imperialistic holiday.  It is a celebration of American diversity, a long overdue recognition of the importance of Catholics and immigrants in American life.  It is a celebration we share with our Hispanic neighbors in the New World and it is a day that testifies to our growing understanding that religious and ethnic pluralism aren’t problems for our American heritage; pluralism is central to our identity as a people.

That American Indian activists want to use the day to make a point is OK with me; they have a point to make.  But Columbus Day is a holiday that was created to celebrate the dignity and equality of Americans regardless of origin or creed, and that in my view is an excellent reason for the country to take the day off.

Happy Columbus Day from Via Meadia.

We will be back to a regular posting schedule tomorrow.

Prices tended to go up when the 301 Yankees walked into the store.

Now it turns out those Yankees were playing with death.  The Washington Post reports that dermatologists think car window sunburn syndrome can lead to melanoma and death.

I suspect some of those good old boys selling RC Colas and Moon Pies to the 301 Yankees would be glad.

Nevertheless some attention should be paid.  Journalist Eugene Kane has the bare bones in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Philadelphia – While out of town last week, I suddenly started receiving urgent long-distance messages about young black people in Milwaukee acting crazy.

Again.

Last time it happened, I was on vacation during the Fourth of July weekend when a bunch of misbehaving young black people ransacked a gas station convenience store and attacked residents in a park.

This time, I was in my hometown of Philadelphia attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention when my BlackBerry started blowing up with news about what happened Thursday night at the Wisconsin State Fair.

According to reports, it was similar to what happened in Riverwest last month, but on a much more brutal – and scarier – scale.

When people start reporting they were being beaten by black people for no other reason than being white people at the State Fair, that’s pretty disturbing.

Here is a news account of the violence.  As Kane points out, Milwaukee isn’t the only city to have seen problems like this.

For most of the summer, Philadelphia cops have dealt with a series of so-called flash mobs that turned violent, scores of young blacks roaming the center city area and attacking mostly white pedestrians and shoppers.

It’s so bad, Mayor Michael Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey recently announced a coordinated response to the problem, which involves law enforcement measures, social responses and neighborhood outreach. They’re relying on a network of African-American professionals, community leaders and officials in the city to step up to the plate.

On Friday, Nutter said he would increase police street patrols and enforce curfews for young people. The city’s curfew ordinance says children under the age of 13 must be home by 10 p.m., and young people between the ages of 13 and 18 must be home by midnight.

Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson has described Philadelphia flash mobs for the Philadelphia Inquirer like this:

Flash mobs have reappeared on the streets of Center City. These groups of mostly black youths gravitate to a designated location at an appointed time. Once there, they become a mob that gathers force as it roams the streets, wreaking havoc on businesses while terrifying and sometimes attacking pedestrians.

Dick Simpson of the Chicago Journal describes the situation in his city:

These well-known social conditions breed anger and lawlessness. And so we now have black “flash mobs” attacking whites in the Loop, on public beaches along the North Side, as well as throughout the River North and Lakeview neighborhoods.

The term “flash mob” originated when college-aged kids would converge on a spot like Grand Central Station in New York

and do seemingly-impromptu performance art.

But now, the term is being applied to violent groups. For several years, roving groups of black teenagers have attacked folks on the South and West sides of Chicago as far out as Oak Park.

These young folks in gangs and flash mobs are not afraid of the police. They attack and steal quickly — they are gone long before the police arrive. They just move on to another spot for their next attack. The beatings of victims can be brutal.

Another great read that will make you a significantly sharper and better informed student of the contemporary world is Amanda Foreman’s compulsively readable World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.  American historians are consistently bad at integrating American political and historical events with events, movements and ideas in other countries.  In 1861 Britain was the world’s greatest power and it was incomparably America’s most important export market and our most important source of investment capital.  The South believed that the British ruling elite’s hatred of democracy would combine with its manufacturers’ need for cotton to bring Britain in on the South’s side.  There were times when this almost happened; Foreman’s book illuminates key events and fascinating personalities on both sides of the Atlantic.  Well worth the time.

Almost forgotten today, the Black Tom explosion was a powerful demonstration to Americans that Europe’s problems would not leave us in peace.  It also set off a search for the terrorists in our midst; ultimately Germany was found responsible, and two world wars later, the German government actually finished paying for the damage.

Franz von Papen, who organized German sabotage groups in the US while serving in Germany’s diplomatic mission to Washington, one of the Germans believed to be involved in planning the raid.  Indicted for his part in another attack, he went on to become Chancellor of Germany in 1932.  It was on his advice that President von Hindenberg named Adolf Hitler Chancellor in January 1933.  Von Papen entered Hitler’s first coalition cabinet as Vice Chancellor, confident that he could outmaneuver the Austrian upstart.  He went on to serve as Hitler’s ambassador to Austria and Turkey.  He was acquitted of war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials.   Made a Papal Chamberlain by John XXIII, von Papen died peacefully in 1969.

Americans still live in the world of Black Tom.  Fears of terror and sabotage and the awareness that foreign struggles can endanger us at home are part of the background of our lives.  It was 85 years between Black Tom and 9/11; let’s hope it will be at least as long before we face anything else of this kind.

At The American Interest we’ve been following the Civil War on The Long Recall daily Civil War blog. Check back tomorrow for the surprising Northern reaction to the Union defeat.

The problem of the twentieth century may have been, as W. E. B. Du Bois put it so eloquently, the color line; the twenty-first century is on course to witness the death of race as a significant political and cultural concept.

Whether one looks at the United States or at the wider world, the diminishing salience of race – in politics, culture and economics – is one of the most important though little remarked on facts of our time.

The death of race would be good news for the United States.  Race has always (and appropriately) been the skunk at the American picnic.  The long reign of slavery followed by 80 years of Jim Crow is a horror and a shame in American history that undermines some of our favorite ideas about ourselves.  The existence of a largely Black urban underclass is one of America’s most serious problems and the roots of so much urban and rural poverty and human suffering in that painful history poses policy problems the American mind has trouble addressing.

All this remains true, but as time goes by people everywhere seem to care less and less about skin color.  Malcolm X’s call for a union of non-white people against the white oppressors does not resonate like it used to.  Former Brazilian President Lula cast responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis on ‘blond haired people with blue eyes’; that was neither accurate in terms of the demographics of Wall Street nor useful as a political rallying cry.

Internationally, race has already largely disappeared as a viable political idea.  Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Koreans are more conscious than ever of what divides them than of some common ‘racial’ destiny; the Vietnamese want to strengthen their ties with the US to help keep China at bay.  Indians and Pakistanis are more interested in religion than in skin color.  The steadfast commitment of the ANC’s leadership to a multiracial vision for South Africa’s future has weakened the importance of racial identity politics throughout Africa, especially given the moral, economic and political bankruptcy of the grandiose socialist/Black Power ideology embraced by early post-colonial regimes.  In any case, sub-Saharan politics today revolves around questions of religion, language and tribe; race can still be a potent political mobilizer but it is much less important to Africans today than it was fifty years ago.

When DuBois wrote, the color line was a real economic and political division.  Only one ‘non-white’ country had modernized its economy; other than Japan all the world’s non-white countries had either been carved up into European or American colonies or (like China, Ethiopia and the Ottoman Empire) struggled to cope with richer and more technologically advanced rivals.  Pre-industrial and pre-modern societies were helpless before the economic and military might of the industrial giants.  A tiny British garrison and an industrious civil service could secure the British Empire in India.  Even a tin-pot monarch like Belgium’s notorious King Leopold could rule an African empire.  As the British poet Hillaire Belloc put it, “Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not.”

The sharp divergence in the fortunes of white and non-white peoples meshed with poorly understood Darwinian ideas to lead many to believe that races were engaged in a great competition to shape the future of the world.  The ‘weaker’ races, like the original natives of the Americas and Australia, would be pushed to the wall by the ‘stronger’ ones.  The “yellow” and the “white” races were doomed at some future date to a contest for global supremacy.

Outside Minister Farrakhan’s social circle, people don’t think like this anymore.  The collapse of European colonialism in the twenty years after World War Two removed the sense of a common, white enemy that united independence activists across the non-white world.  Over the next thirty years, the success of “capitalist road” developing economies in East Asia and elsewhere combined with the failures of socialism to weaken the belief that the real struggle of world politics was a struggle of the mostly non-white South against the largely white North.

The Third World split up as the twentieth century expired.  Brazil, India, China and South Africa don’t have as much in common with each other – much less with Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar and Bolivia – as they once did.  Struggles in Africa like the Rwandan genocide, the Nigerian civil war and the Sudanese wars eroded any idea that racial solidarity could organize African politics even as the generation of post-colonial Black Power Pan-Africanists (Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Mugabe) failed their countries and disappointed their supporters.  As the human race develops, loosey-goosey categories like “race” matter much less; economics, religion and culture matter more.

Both abroad and in the US, the key factor weakening race and racism has been the success of non-whites.  China, Korea, India, Brazil and Japan are the biggest success stories but there are many others.  Non-white success is both eroding the sense of a global pecking order with white countries at the top, and undermining the belief that whites have created an economic system which depends on the exploitation of everyone else.  Non-white success refutes theories of white supremacy and defuses anti-white bitterness.  In addition to these macro-stories of Asian, Latin and South African success, countless micro-stories of non-white individuals who flourish and succeed in a liberal, competitive environment have helped free the non-white world from any lingering inferiority complex and pulled the rug from under the feet of white supremacists.

The United States has also been transformed by non-white success.  As African Americans became increasingly successful and prominent across the professions, more and more whites found arguments about racial inferiority less compelling.  More, the African American middle class, so painstakingly educated against the odds by courageous leaders like Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver and inspired by the ideas of thinkers like Dubois and Gandhi, was large enough and able enough to provide the leadership that enabled American Blacks to win the civil rights struggle.

Elijah Mohammad and the Nation of Islam used to argue that white hatred of Blacks was so intense and profound that Blacks could never achieve true equality in a white-dominated US.  That argument seemed much stronger in 1960 than in 2010; that Farrakhan is now denouncing an American Black president as a murderer and idolizing the Great Loon of Libya shows us all what happens when an ideology hits the end of the road.

The Normalization of Race?

As the external barriers to Black success in the US gradually diminished, the meaning of ‘blackness’ began a complex and still continuing metamorphosis.  America has always been a nation of shifting boundaries and definitions.  In the nineteenth century the term “race” was often applied to different nationalities in Europe; people spoke of the deep differences between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin, Celtic, Slavic and Jewish “races”.  Ethnic groups often had to fight decades of prejudice before being considered truly “white”; as  recently as the 1920s, the Ku Kluxers and other white power groups lumped African-Americans, Italian-Americans and Jewish Americans together on its hate list.

More recently, Asian Americans have largely made the shift from being an intimidating and alien racial “other” to being just another ethnic flavor in the great American melting pot.  As intermarriage levels rise and Asian immigrants continue to embrace Christianity (at many elite colleges the children of Asian immigrants are among the most active members of evangelical campus groups), we are already approaching the day when being Asian American is more like being Irish American than anything else — an identity that you choose and define for yourself rather than a collection of stereotypes imposed on you by the wider community.

The American response to ethnic and cultural diversity has been simultaneously to celebrate and to trivialize ethnic roots.  We dye the Chicago River green on St. Patrick’s Day, but to be Irish American rather than German American or even Waspo American means less and less.  For most Euro Americans, their ethnic heritage is a suit of clothes they wear when they want and leave at home when they want — you are no more and no less Irish or Italian or Swedish than you want to be.  Americans can be intensely involved with their ethnic group — belonging to the Dutch Reformed Church or the Italian-Americans War Veterans — or they can ignore their heritage completely.  We celebrate diversity so thoroughly because it means so little; ethnic festivals and roots have become part of the common American identity.

Race had been the great exception to this process, but that is beginning to change.  What has been happening in modern America is that the concept of Black is slowly following the path that concepts like Italian, Irish and Jewish took in the last century.  “Negro” or “colored” was once an all-embracing, all-defining involuntary identity that both public opinion and the state imposed on individuals regardless of their preferences or wishes.  When I was born, the law in South Carolina mandated that a racial classification appear on my birth certificate; that classification determined where I would go to school, what hotels and restaurants I could legally patronize and who I could marry.

Those who broke the written and unwritten laws of race — by dating the wrong person, moving into the wrong neighborhood, sitting at the wrong lunch counter or attempting to enroll in the wrong school – were subject to legal penalties; worse, they were often the targets of mob violence that sometimes climaxed with grisly and sadistic lynching.  For decades government was impotent to protect the victims of these outrageous attacks; race based hatred and fear were stronger forces in much of America than the Constitution and orthodox Christianity combined.  Neither the pulpit nor the judicial bench could tame the demon of racial hatred in this otherwise blessed land.

Things have changed in the last ninety years.  The distinction between racial and ethnic categories is blurring; to be African American in the US today is more like being Italian American or Jewish American in 1920 than it is like being a Negro in that year.  Rates of intermarriage are increasing; racial background is becoming a less accurate predictor of social and economic status and while many Blacks remain both marginalized and poor, the United States now boasts a large and prosperous Black middle class.

Black poverty remains an important social problem in the United States — in many ways the most serious and tragic social problem we have.  It is one of the Obama administration’s greatest failings that the President has not yet found a way to address the needs of the inner city and, as I’ve written in earlier posts, all Americans should be concerned by the many ways in which the ongoing disintegration of the blue social model will affect African Americans and especially the poor.

Intellectuals in America tend to lag behind society in understanding the changes taking place around us; race is no exception.  When race was the great problem and source of evil in American society sixty and seventy years ago, the academy was largely segregated and most academics tended to give the subject a wide berth.  As race has become less important and the risks associated with an anti-racist position declined, academia has jumped all over the issue and for some the question of race has become the central organizing focus for scholarly inquiry and social thought.

The decline of the salience of race has another consequence in American life: the decline in the quality of the leadership of traditional Black organizations.  One hundred years ago, to be a Black doctor, Black lawyer, Black undertaker or Black teacher, you had to work in “colored” institutions and practices.  Black musicians and entertainers were once confined to the “race” market, just as Black athletes had to play in Negro leagues.

Under these conditions the best and the brightest in Black America focused their talents and attention largely on race issues.  Morally, the injustice was so stark and the threat of racial violence was so great, that conscience demanded a race-centric career.  Economically, there was no alternative to a career based on service to the African-American community.  The invisible walls forced all African Americans into a racial ghetto.

Little by little those walls came down.  Athletes and entertainers were among the first to escape.  Professionals soon followed.  Howard loomed less large in the Black mind as Black teachers got tenure at Harvard and as the best African-American students gained access to every college in the country.  The best Black professionals could earn more money, have more power and achieve more by working on Wall Street than by working for historically Black financial institutions; lawyers made more from general practice than from pure civil rights or community focused work.  While some first-rate people continue to choose to work in the world of historically Black institutions or to serve race-focused causes, inevitably the opening of other doors has had its effect.  (In the same way, the end of housing segregation allowed the growing Black middle class to leave inner city ghettos for the suburbs.  The quality of community leadership in the inner city declined even as Blacks generally became more successful.)

This experience is one of the ways in which Black America is becoming more like other ethnic groups and less like a unique outlier.  Early generation immigrant communities from other groups also once stuck together in the way that Blacks did.  Irish and Italian lawyers got jobs working for Irish and Italian clients; Irish and Italian schoolteachers had better luck getting jobs teaching “their own” while discrimination against Catholics and immigrants held them down.  Tightly focused immigrant neighborhoods clustered around Catholic churches and operated a series of parallel institutions (like parochial schools) that offered both education and employment within the ethnic cocoon.  Anti-immigrant feeling in the wider community kept immigrants in the cocoon: Protestant school boards insisted on using the King James Bible in school, meaning that many Catholic parents and teachers could not conscientiously participate.  Many colleges and private firms had barriers (No Irish Need Apply) or quotas to keep “pushy” newcomers out of good jobs.  Over time, the walls of these ethnic ghettos also came down, and the best and the brightest left the ethnic community behind to engage in the larger society around them.

Both among Blacks and white ethnic groups like the Irish and the Italians, elected local politicians and the clergy seem to be the last professions for whom ethnicity is the focus of professional activity — and in many cases the quality of the people filling these roles has declined as more opportunities appear for young people to build different kinds of careers.

The Black identity has a much longer history in the US than the immigrant identities and its hold is still strong.  Because racism generally is declining but has not yet disappeared, and because the forces that once pushed Blacks together and the pull of communal history and loyalty are so strong, the shift from a racial to a post-racial identity for Black America will be wrenching and slow.

The forces propping up the invisible walls around the race ghetto, paradoxically enough, include the various policies developed over the last fifty years to overcome the legacy of past discrimination.  Affirmative action, minority set-asides, racial gerrymanders, ethnic study departments in universities and other programs and policies encourage and subsidize the existence of a race-focused leadership group.  The African American experience is deep enough, and the consequences of past racism deep enough, that some forms of special social focus on the problems of this group are still needed.  But sooner rather than later the question of reforming these programs to make them both more effective at solving real problems and less costly and intrusive is going to have to be faced.  

Today we face a paradox that is going to demand new ways of thinking.  To help poor African Americans we may have to think less about race.  The social problems of the inner city are increasingly human, urban and political problems, and race-based solutions may not help as much as they once did.  Affirmative action can help qualified African Americans compete for jobs in the marketplace; it cannot help a ninth-grade dropout with a drug problem earn a middle class standard of living. We are coming to the point where the well-qualified African American needs affirmative action less and less, while the inner city kid who needs all the help he or she can get doesn’t benefit from it at all.

As race declines in significance globally and nationally, the relationship between race and poverty also changes.  Racial discrimination must be taken into account, historically speaking, for understanding why so much of the American underclass is non-white.  But racial discrimination today (which has by no means vanished and still needs to be fought) is ever less important in explaining the economic and social difficulties of children growing up fatherless in gang-infested, drug-dependent neighborhoods.  That your grandparents’ skin color was black helps provide a historical explanation for why you are stuck in a bombed-out inner city landscape of social devastation; that historical fact may provide an extra reason why society should interest itself in helping you (though there are plenty of other, more immediate ones).  But that history is of very limited use in helping you think about improving your situation — or to society as it tries to think of ways of doing something useful about the problems you face.

To be morally decent people and to build a stronger society, Americans of all colors cannot forget about our history of racial oppression.  But to continue liquidating the bitter legacy of race, America must move on.

Whatever one thinks about President Obama’s performance in office, his election — and Louis Farrakhan’s bitter reaction to an America changed beyond his imagination — still demonstrates that the United States has turned an important corner.  The color line is now just one of many questions we face, and race is losing its power to warp and diminish American life.